Artificial Intelligence Overview

spiderfarmer writes: "Well, it feels slightly odd to suggest one of my own articles, but here goes. I've recently completed a brief overview of the current state of AI. The article concept was focused on Cyc, but scope creep being what it is, I ended up doing an overview of the entire field. Some of the Slashdot gang were fairly helpful in pointing me towards experts who would talk to me and towards white papers and books I might not have otherwise found. So, I thought they might be interested in how I put all the information together."

Comments

Oh, NO!

[perdida]

"If you look at an encyclopedia, you'll see a great deal of knowledge of the world represented in the form of articles. Common sense is exactly not this knowledge. Common sense is the complement of this knowledge. It is the white space behind the words. It is all of the knowledge that the article writer assumed all of his/her readers would already have prior to reading the article -- knowledge that could be put to use in order to understand the article. Cyc is about representing and automating the white space." (I love that answer.)

Common sense is about representing and automating the white space?

I think these AI researchers need to talk to a few more sociologists. Human common sense is extremely culturally divergent and goes far beyond the simple, textbook logic cases that certain engineers in this field would probably cite. "Reading between the lines" involves not some native common sense that is wedded to intelligence, but a collectively evolved cultural contextualization. When we read an article in an encyclopedia, a lot of other stuff other than intelligence comes into play: x years of public school education, idiomatic constructs, varying by geographic location, that may or may not enhance or obscure meaning, and, of course, the double meanings and entendres inserted by bored or biased encyclopedia writers.

The entire postmodern project of literary criticism has been aimed at proving this point- at proving that there is no such thing as a standardized set of meanings, and that every meaning is contextualized. The Modernists wanted to rationalize and bureacratize speech, to restrict the number of meanings, and to leave what is unsaid in a narrow, predictable whitespace of a unified "common sense."

Of course, there is a language like this, developed in the first half of this century. It takes away as many English words as possible to restrict the meanings that we are able to THINK, let alone say. Of course, this language is called Newspeak.