Given that the Purpose of a System is What it Does, What is the Purpose of AI?
You may be familiar with the phrase "The purpose of a system is what it does". It is a useful way to re-evaluate things that exist.
To quote Wikipedia:
[It] is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it.
Given this framing, the purpose of AI could be perceived as highly multi-faceted.
The purpose of AI is to make people feel like they're being productive, regardless of the outputs. Ask any CEO and they'll tell you that they feel like they're flying through the day, getting more done. The people around them might disagree.
The purpose of AI is to make rapid software prototyping faster and easier for a small team, where the quality of the code does not need to be high, it just needs to test the concept.
The purpose of AI is to raise energy prices and drain lakes.
The purpose of AI is to make it possible to get an answer as reliable as you would get from a Reddit thread, but without having to trawl through Reddit itself.
It'd be easy to go on.
But none of these are the purpose of AI.
It does do all of these things, but these things are byproducts, none of them are what AI actually does.
AI consistently does one thing.
The purpose of AI is to increase the perceived value of companies to make money on the stock market.
Everything else is just a byproduct.