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Is AI Development Moving In the Wrong Direction? (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right? We often see reports that promise near breakthroughs, but time and again they don't come to fruition. The cause of this may be that we're trying to solve the wrong problem. Will Sweatman took a look at the history of AI projects starting with the code-breaking machines of WWII and moving up to modern efforts like IBM's Watson and Google's Inceptionism. His conclusion is that we haven't actually been trying to solve "intelligence" (or at least our concept of intelligence has been wrong). And that with faster computing and larger pools of data the goal has moved toward faster searches rather than true intelligence.
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example. They can play unique games and be stronger than any human player. Yes, they are given the rules of chess and machines did not invent chess. But they have passed beyond human abilities and it is at the point where some programs are coded to only make move patterns that humans would tend to make. Learning how to adapt machine intelligence to our real world problems is challenging. But we are in for a fright when computers get really good at analyzing human problems and applying better solutions that we now have at hand.
Define "true intelligence". The more computers advance in doing complex things, the more you will see there is no such thing as true intelligence. You are a very big Turing machine, get over it.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I'm not really sure it's academia's fault, but more that the entertainment industry got a bit carried away with stories about future AI, and now people think that if it doesn't look like that, then it's not AI, all the while missing the massive advances in computing that AI research has netted them from facial recognition, to self repairing networks, from spell/grammar check to siri, and from Google search results from increasingly natural language type queries through to computer run video game opponents.
Effectively saying AI has failed is like saying Physics has failed because we don't yet have an all encompassing grand unified theory of the universe. These things are the long term goal, and we're not even remotely far along the journey towards that goal, so to criticise because we're not there yet is exactly like being the screaming kid in the back of the parents car shouting "ARE WE THERE YET?".
Not that it matters, because AI research is bearing commercial fruit anyway so it doesn't really matter what the public thinks of it, money will keep being poured into it regardless. AI is fortunate that it's a self-sustaining area of scientific research, it doesn't need good PR with the public when it's churning out cash for corporations. In that respect it has it much easier than many areas of science do, such as space exploration for example that is still somewhat struggling to get necessary funding for it's goals so perhaps it's as much that the AI research industry doesn't care what the public thinks as it is that it's failing to sell itself well in the court of the public opinion. The public are consuming it's results and paying money for the privilege regardless of the opinion they hold of the field - how many iPhones 6s were sold over the competition thanks in part to things like gesture recognition, learning autocomplete on the keyboard, and Siri? how many ads are to be sold on Google? and how many BB-8s are ending up under the tree this Christmas?