I heard a talk by the head of this project a while ago. Cyc grew out of the basically forgotten AI field of Expert Systems which was popular in the 80's but basically fell into obscurity when they were found to be too fragile and labor intensive to be very useful. Basically Cyc is a very big dictionary with a few very basic reasoning rules about classes, instances, membership, etc. When Cyc asks it is human, it is simply asking if it should put the Cyc object in the Human class. It is just as likely to ask is Cyc a potato? No one should fear this is likely to become intelligent anytime soon.
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I heard a talk by the head of this project a while ago. Cyc grew out of the basically forgotten AI field of Expert Systems which was popular in the 80's but basically fell into obscurity when they were found to be too fragile and labor intensive to be very useful. Basically Cyc is a very big dictionary with a few very basic reasoning rules about classes, instances, membership, etc. When Cyc asks it is human, it is simply asking if it should put the Cyc object in the Human class. It is just as likely to ask is Cyc a potato? No one should fear this is likely to become intelligent anytime soon.