What Is AI? Part 2 – Demystifying AI Through Four Acts
Table of Contents Introduction Act One: AI as Metaphor and Speculative Frame for Procedural Automation (1980s–1990s) From Laboratories to Everyday Life Cultural Imagination: Between Utopian and Dystopian Frames Act Two: The Machine Learning Turn (Mid 1990s–2000s) Agentic Shift From Static Programs to Adaptive Algorithms Illustrative Example: A Machine-Learning Wardrobe Recommender Paradoxes of Machine Learning Footnotes Scene from the 1983 sci-fi thriller WarGames, directed by John Badham. The film dramatizes a near-catastrophe triggered by a military decision to entrust U.S. nuclear deterrence to an autonomous AI system that treats thermonuclear war as a solvable optimization problem. Source: DVDXtras, “WarGames (1983) | Behind the Scenes,” Internet Archive, June 2, 2022. <LINK> *Continuing from: “What Is AI?” Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines In the previous segment of our genealogical survey, we have traced ancient imaginaries that seeded today’s visions of machine intelligence. From Yan Shi’s mechanical performers to Talos’ bronze vigilance and the ritual logic of golems and Homunculi, we explored how mythic prototypes shaped the rhetorical terrain on which “AI” would later emerge as a technological category. Whereas earlier societies used myth and ritual to make sense of uncanny forms of artificial agency and “thinking machines,” in this second part we turn from historical mythologies to present-day technological possibilities. The term “artificial intelligence” circulates in our cultural lifeworld with astonishing fluidity. It appears in commercials, policy reports, sci-fi movies, legal disputes, and everyday conversations. It is used to describe everything from basic computer programs to sophisticated generative models capable of complex knowledge-performance. ...