A.I.? Nope. Not Now, Not Ever

 The Ticker guy goes off on the smarmies who tell you that artificial intelligence is here, including the pleasant dunderhead that Bannon employs.

It's not here now, and never will be.

...There is no such thing.  There never has been and I argue there likely never will be either.  Certainly, there is no evidence we're any closer to it in actuality than we have ever been in the age of computing, which runs back to roughly the 1960s....

Cutting to the chase:

...the fundamental character of how a computer works has not changed since the first calculating machines.  Yes, before transistors and even tubes there were calculating machines but they were all, even when mechanically-based, deterministic devices.  We have found evidence of such devices that, for example, calculated the precise date and time of solar eclipses.  Being deterministic, absolute facts a calculating machine can give you that answer, and it will be correct....

 ...But "intelligence" isn't that.  It is not simply the manifest weight of how many times something is repeated, for example.  You do not need to see a child walk in front of a car and get smushed to know that said child will be killed by the car; the outcome is intuitively obvious to humans yet while we can describe the acceleration or impact that a living body can withstand without being damaged or destroyed we have to teach a machine that this is undesirable and thus to be avoided.

Worse, even after we do that its not enough because the machine cannot accurately infer from other cues in the environment that a child might be present where said kid cannot be seen (e.g. behind the bumper or hood of a vehicle) and might run out into the road.  Yet humans both can and do, every day, make exactly that sort of inference...

That (inference ability) is directly related to the core reason that "AI" will never exist; that is, AI cannot and never will ask "WHY?"   Asking "why" requires one to produce an answer which is not "learned" by repetition in advance.

So if you're paying up for something that "has AI," you've been had.

Don't say we didn't tell you.