Linus: I just don't see the thing to be fearful of.

We'll get AI, and it will almost certainly be through something very much like recurrent neural networks. And the thing is, since that kind of AI will need training, it won't be "reliable" in the traditional computer sense. It's not the old rule-based prolog days, when people thought they'd *understand* what the actual decisions were in an AI.

And that all makes it very interesting, of course, but it also makes it hard to productize. Which will very much limit where you'll actually find those neural networks, and what kinds of network sizes and inputs and outputs they'll have.

So I'd expect just more of (and much fancier) rather targeted AI, rather than anything human-like at all. Language recognition, pattern recognition, things like that. I just don't see the situation where you suddenly have some existential crisis because your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you.

The whole "Singularity" kind of event? Yeah, it's science fiction, and not very good SciFi at that, in my opinion. Unending exponential growth? What drugs are those people on? I mean, really..

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Linus is one of the very few people working in computers and operating systems whose judgement I actually trust without having to take it with a grain of salt.

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My favorite Linus interview was about 15 years ago.

Some dude asked him if since Java was becoming so popular, was he going to switch the kernel to java?

Instead of even trying to explain, he just said "Well, no.  That would not work."


I literally wet myself.