*I've never seen an era when Artificial Intelligence wasn't swamped in "misinformation." This misfortune probably starts with the very term "Artificial Intelligence," which is kinda hopeless, but too old and deep to dig out. It's like calling a mosquito-born disease "Mal Aria," meaning bad air. It's still called "malaria," but there's been enough linguistic drift that people can really deal with the real malaria instead of mostly fighting their own illusions.
*The version of "AI" that emerges from these debunking is really an interesting technology. It may not be fake, utopian and metaphysical, but it's humanly comprehensible and doing some cool stuff. Also, it may not need mega billions in funding from Industry moguls and panicky governments, but it could get lots done with a few hundred million here and there.
(...)
Unfortunately, the problem of overhyped AI extends beyond the media itself. In fact, for decades, since AI’s inception many (though certainly not all) of the leading figures in AI have fanned the flames of hype.
This goes back to early founders who believed that we might now call artificial general intelligence (AGI) was no more than a couple decades away. In 1966, the MIT AI lab famously assigned Gerald Sussman the problem of solving vision in a summer; as we all know, machine vision still hasn't been solved over five decades later. General AI still seems like it might be a couple decades away, sixty years after the first optimistic projections were issued.
This trend continues in the modern era. Here are some examples from the more recent history of AI, from some of its best known contemporary figures... (((proceeds to point fingers and name names at quite interesting length.)))
