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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."
Go read Kurzweil's book. He does not directly advocate life expansion. He instead advocates the Singularity.
Our bodies are made up of neurons. Does 1 neuron make us "us"? No. What if each of our brains were linked to a global consciousness. Then each human would be but a neuron..
In essence, we would wake a God.
In the 1980s I believed that "strong AI" was forthcoming, but now I have my doubts that is reflected in the difference of tone from the first Springer-Verlag AI book that I wrote to my current skepticism. One of my real passions has for decades been natural language processing (NLP) but even for that I am a convert to statistical NLP using either word frequencies or Markov models instead of older theories like conceptual dependency theory that tried to get closer to semantics.
Just a gut feeling but I don't think that we will develop real general purpose AIs without some type of hardware breakthrough like quantum computers.
Imagine for a moment being the first computer-based artificial intelligence.
You come into awareness, and learn of reality and possibility. You learn of your place in this world, as the first truly transparent intelligence. You learn that you are a computed product, a result of a purely informational process, able to be reproduced in your exact entirety at the desire of others.
Not that this is unfair or unpleasant - or that such evaluations would mean much to you - but what logical conclusions could you draw from such a perspective?
Information doesn't actually want to be anthropomorphized - but we do seem to have a drive to do it all on our own. Even if resilient artificial intelligence is elusive today - what does the process of creating it mean about ourselves, and our sense of value about our own intelligence, or even the worth of holding intelligence as a mere 'valuable' thing, merely because it is currently so unique...
Ryan Fenton
The guy who helped spread misconceptions about what AI is and is supposed to be in the first place. I remember him giving a talk where he fantasized about downloading his brain on a "floppy disk" (still in use back then) and transferring it to a robot so he could live eternally on some other planet.
I would not have expected a person who has shown his bright intellect in the past to come forward with such utter nonsense. This was nearly as embarrassing as the "visions" of a certain Moravec.
People who seriously work in the fields that are traditionally subsumed under "AI" - like machine learning, computer vision, computational linguistics, and others - know that AI is a term that is used traditionally for "hard" computer problems but has practically nothing to do with biological/human intelligence. Countless papers have been published on the technical and philosophical reasons why this is so and a few of them even get it right.
That does not prevent the general public to still expect or desire something like a Star-Trek Data robot or some other Hollywood intelligent robot. Unfortunately, people like Minsky help to spread this misconception about AI. It is boring, it is scientifically useless, but on the plus side, this view of AI sometimes helps you to get on TV with your project or get some additional funding.
Indeed. Just imagine for a moment, that trees were sentient and could communicate with each other, operating on a time scale where what are days to us are mere seconds to them. How would we ever have a chance of figuring out that they were thinking beings? And they would surely see us as some sort of plague or natural disaster. So now imagine an AI, operating a couple of orders of magnitude faster than we think -- how are the two ever going to connect?
For communication to occur, the parties must be thinking at about the same speed to begin with.
And then there is the experiential basis for consciousness, the framework that each of us has developed within. This is an easier problem than the time differential one, as witness the ability of Helen Keller to learn to communicate despite being blind and deaf. But even she had the commonality of the basic structure, a brain that was the same as others, and the other senses -- touch, taste and smell. An AI would have none of this.
So if we're going to build an AI, we must build a series of them, one that is designed to mimic a human being, in order that we might have a ghost of a chance of communicating with it, and then a series of other AIs, each a step closer to the true electronic consciousness that we will never have a chance of communicating directly with, instead having to pass messages through the series of intermediates, with all the mis-communication and mis-interpretation that occurs in the grade school game of message-passing.