More Humanlike Means Less Autonomous
More Humanlike Means Less Autonomous
Publish Date: 2026-01-26 08:15:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
Even though GenAI is so seemingly humanlike, it generally demands the supervision of a real human at each step – it’s less potentially autonomous than predictive AI. This image riffs on a classic episode of “I Love Lucy.”
Eric Siegel (with ChatGPT)
The AI executives are at it again, promising human-level machines in the near future. In Davos, the CEOs of Google DeepMind and Anthropic each doubled down on the near-term arrival of artificial general intelligence – the hypothetical capacity for a machine to do most anything a human can – giving it 50% odds of arriving by 2030 and expecting it to arrive this year or next, respectively.
Is AI overpromised? Will the hype cost us dearly when the widespread narrative is recognized as overzealous and disillusionment sets in? Or is human-level machine intelligence around the corner?
As hard as I’ve argued against the AI hype, I have to admit that it’s a religious debate. We’re not approaching consensus. There will always be a contingent who believes even AI’s most grandiose promises.
Yet there’s a lot to be gained by clarifying what it is that we’re arguing about. After all, business leaders and investors need to understand exactly what they’re betting on as they struggle to pursue sound strategies rather than wishful thinking.
To Hype AI Is To Promise Extraordinary Machine Autonomy
The question of whether the AI hype overpromises is a question of goodness: Will AI soon become as good as promised?
But that opens a can of worms: How do we measure goodness? The most obvious answer is intelligence. The more intelligent, the better. Pursuing intelligence has won the day in the public’s eye. After all, the notion that’s making the world salivate is called artificial intelligence.
But “intelligence” does not represent a viable yardstick. It’s subjective. How could we know when it’s been achieved – or even when there’s been progress toward it? Any test designed to measure “intelligence” only diminishes…
