There is no AI

speckx 21 points 6 comments September 01, 2026
wadler.blogspot.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

whattheheckheck

The Ole kantian philosophy

LoganDark

Since when exactly has artificial intelligence ever implicated the existence of a mind at all? It's always been about knowledge, intuition and the application of such, so of course large language models at least technically count. If you specifically want a mind, then perhaps you're interested in something more specific than mere artificial intelligence.

hackingonempty

This post is on Phil Wadler's blog (of haskell and monads fame) but it is entirely a 2023 quote from Jaron Lanier (of VR fame.)

jujube3

This seems to be a very typical fallacy. "AI is just a collection of stuff people made." No. The Internet was that. AI is something that was TRAINED on stuff people made. So are you. The logical outcome of this fallacy is believing that AI will collapse if it has to train on data it generated. (It won't: a lot of famous AIs were trained this way, including AlphaGo many years ago.)

huurtehoog

AI, like automation, means different things and these are often conflated. AI can mean roughly 'advanced software functionality' but it can also convey the intention of somehow getting output with higher value than the input available. One of them is used in a misleading manner for various reasons. Automation may mean restricted behavior as in "this contraption will always do Y if X happens" but it can also mean "this contraption will always do the right thing regardless of what you throw at it". Again, one of them is a way to mislead people.

aaroninsf

One more summation of what "AI" is or LLM do that betrays no particular understanding.

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