AI has been a field within computer science since at least the 1950s. It encompasses algorithms for making decisions, which is why so many technologies are labeled this way. “Intelligence” may seem like an odd choice of terminology (some people conflate it with sentience or similar), but general machine intelligence is one goal of this study, and the applications of AI are putative steps to that end.

Back when those guys started talking about what methods could get us there, things like decision trees, symbolic manipulation, neural nets, were all potential pathways that were on the table. So these get included in the field because that’s where and to what end they were produced.

Another thing is that intelligence can be narrow in its domain. A character in a video game that needs to move from point A to point B can do so following something like the A* pathfinding algorithm. In the domain of graph traversal/pathfinding, it’s hard to imagine something much more intelligent (or fit to solve the problem) than A* despite being a simple algorithm.

But yeah, as a marketing term it is kind of silly since most people don’t know what it means. It remains a useful categorization for a broad field of study/research in CS though.

Thanks! This is so much more usable than old.reddit on mobile. I’m a +1 for compact mode but this has earned a place on my home screen for sure.

How do you go back to the feed after clicking into a post? I don’t see any kind of back button in the interface. (Trying it as a PWA on iOS.)

As the gp poster I didn’t mean to sound like I’m dumping on rural life. I grew up in a rural area, riding four-wheelers and roaming the woods till the sun went down. One of my best friends started a family around the same time I did and opted to buy some acreage a decent commute away from town. They ride dirt bikes with their kids on literal mountains in the backyard, have a chicken coop and machine shop, deer wander up and eat their vegetable garden. It’s super rad and I wouldn’t mind having gone that route either.

I really didn’t dig the suburbs and having to drive literally everywhere though. On the balance I liked the diversity in the city and having easy access to metropolitan amenities. I’d never shit on the rural route and it may well be where I end up, I just thought it was wild how much blowback I got from wanting to raise a kid in the city.

My kid is younger but we moved from the suburbs to a dense urban area shortly after he was born. I have to agree even though he’s not yet that independent. Some of my friends back in the burbs were like “what are you going to do with a kid in the city?” But we ride bikes to parks and gardens, go to different museums and the zoo, visit festivals for different cultures. It’s pretty awesome and almost every weekend is an eventful thing for us.