Stephen Dubner

Aren't you happy that yours are so much better than theirs though?

Well, I'm glad you think so.

I hope that wasn't yours because that was a demonstrably mushy question.

my response to that question would be, well, let's define terms.

What's AI?

What everybody's now calling AI is one version of artificial intelligence, but it's very close to many other versions we've already had and will have.

So when I first moved to New York, I'd quit playing music.

I was going to graduate school for writing and I didn't have any money.

So I earned money by doing word processing.

It was as big as like a Buick.

It was a massive machine.

You had to put in these big floppy disks for each function.

So it was like the create a file floppy disk, save a file floppy disk, spell check.

But spell check and saving documents, all these things were some version of what we think of now as AI.

It's just basically using compute power to do stuff that we've already known how to do

but do it better and more efficiently.

Is a dictionary not AI?

It's not my intelligence.

I'm looking up what somebody else figured out.

And they get passed on from generation to generation too.