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Marvin Minsky On AI
An anonymous reader writes "In a three-part Dr. Dobbs podcast, AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future developments in the field. In part 1, 'It's 2001. Where's HAL?' he looks at the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence. In part 2 and in part 3 he offers hope that real progress is in the offing. With this talk from Minsky, Congressional testimony on the digital future from Tim Berners-Lee, life-extension evangelization from Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking planning to go into space, it seems like we may be on the verge of another AI or future-science bubble."
Podcasts are great if you're on the go, but why no transcript for the differently-hearing /.ers? I personally hate having to listen, I'd rather just read it.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
While much of the "traditional AI" hype could be considered dead, robotics is continuing to advance, and much symbolic AI research has evolved into data-driven statistical techniques. So while the top-down ideas that the older AI researches didn't pan out yet, bottom-up techniques will still help close the gap.
Also, you have to remember that AI is pretty much defined as "the stuff we don't know how to do yet". Once we know how to do it, then people stop calling it AI, and then wonder "why can't we do AI?" Machine vision is doing everything from factory inspections to face recognition, we have voice recognition on our cell phones, and context-sensitive web search is common. All those things were considered AI not long ago. Calculators were once even called mechanical brains.
Um... AI may give rise to consciousness, but it won't give rise to your consciousness. We still don't know what makes you "you"; way too much neuroscience to be done.
You assume that a "true" AI would have human like emotional reactions. I suspect that if we ever develop true AIs, we will neither understand how it works nor will we be able to communicate with it very well. Lacking our biological imperatives, I also suspect that true AIs would not really want to do anything.
Why would someone program a true AI which has no built-in goals?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F