If you actually look you can find countries where very attractive women care more about the guys personality and how he cares about them than what he looks like.
Hmmm. I've traveled quite widely and I haven't noticed such a phenomenon. Although if you substitute "personality and how he cares about them" with "money", you may be on the right track at least in some of the very poor 3rd world countries. I will agree that very few women in the world are as 'shallow' in the sense of only caring about looks (and finding intelligence to be a huge turn off) as North American women.
Even if we could make antimatter cheaply and on a large scale it still isn't very practical for interstellar travel. The distances are just so unimaginably immense. There isn't yet even a theoretical substance that could propel us to the stars within a human lifetime and then have enough "fuel" to slow down again. Surely everyone has read that NASA "warp drive when" link by now. I'm getting tired of posting it. The idea is that we really need a true "space drive" for practical interstellar travel. Rocket technology regardless of the fuel just isn't going to do it.
Amendments 1-10, okay, but the purpose of the Constitution isn't to defend anyone's rights, it's to limit the roles and responsibilities of the federal government.
Fixed it for you. The founders were essentially Libertarians.
If I was going to pay for the content that I download, I would want my money going to the people who made it, not people who maintain a network of stolen goods.
And exactly how are you going to do that? With a "donate" button on the artist's website maybe?
Strangely enough chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons would be a lot more effective in actually overthrowing the US government. Can you imagine another civil war, but this time with nukes and weaponized Marburg/Ebola/Lassa? Small arms would be of limited use against even the police force let alone the military. That's not to say that I wouldn't prefer to die shooting rather than being executed by the 2026 government for file sharing.
You are aware that the founders were pretty much all what today we would call Libertarians. Without a doubt they would see our current government as a tyranny beyond imagination. Pretty much their entire intent was to protect the citizens against the government, an institution that they regarded basically as evil. If they could see us today no doubt all of their worst fears would be confirmed. In fact I think they would regard their attempt at keeping their new republic free to be an utter failure. They had far more freedom under British rule than we have today. All of their elaborate measures, their "checks and balances" to prevent government growth, in the long run really served to accomplish very little. Our freedoms are not much different from the England that they fought so hard to be free of. Today they would surely be regarded as terrorists by most people. These are people who fought a major war over a small tax. Even I regard that as a little extreme.
Does Mexico have gun control laws? I'd definitely prefer to be carrying a gun in mexico city. I think a lot of people in favor of gun control are people who have never been mugged or assaulted in the street. There are some places that I have vowed I would never return without at least pepper spray. But I would feel safer with a gun. The biggest problem with a gun though is that you tend to kill the person that you shoot. So it is a very serious step to take. You have to really believe that they are going to actually kill you, and it is difficult to be sure of that even if they are pointing a gun at you. I suppose the only thing that would REALLY make me feel confident in a bad neighborhood would be an armed suitcase nuke with a dead man's switch. Then they can kill me all they want and I'll still get my revenge
Actually I don't make too many assumptions about what environmentalists are thinking. If they don't want to seem stupid then maybe they should stop saying dumb things like "we are going to destroy the earth". There is little evidence to support the idea that a warmer planet would be the end of the human species. I think a world government enforced ban on combustion would be more likely to destroy our species. If they can advocate a return to pre-industrial civilization along with a police state to enforce it all, it's pretty hard to guess what is going on their heads. Now you might claim that no one is advocating that, but to me that just makes it worse, because other than most of the world moving to nuclear for all electricity generation and going electric with all transportation, there is not much else that can really be done to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. To fix the problem it would be necessary to significantly reduce or eliminate combustion products of all kinds. That's not just going back to the middle ages. That's going back to the pre-history before even fire was invented. Is having hundreds of thousands of nuclear plants all running at full capacity to supply the constantly increasing energy needs of the world a safer world than one with a growing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Maybe it is. But it really depends on stuff we don't know yet. I would welcome nuclear plants in every neighborhood. Why don't the environmentalists typically agree? Another reason why I can't figure them out. If they really want a solution to the problem they should be the biggest nuclear power advocates out there and would even be willing to live near nuclear waste disposal sites. After all the alternative is Armegeddon, right?
A very common fallacy is that a PSU always draws as many watts as it's rated for A testament to the utter stupidity of the human race perhaps? I would like to think that the slashdot crowd would mostly be aware what power ratings are for.
What exactly does "grenhouse gas regulation" mean anyway? Whatever laws were passed would need to have some pretty serious teeth in order to enforce. Basic human needs are being met with greenhouse gas production. Getting people to go against their own survival needs and suffer great hardship for this abstract idea of "saving the planet" is not going to be easy. I guess you could just raise federal gas taxes to a very high (I am thinking $30/gallon) level. That should at least somewhat reduce CO2 emmision from car exhaust. Only the rich would be able to afford to drive a car or use non nuclear-electric public transportation. Also create a huge tax on all electricity that is not created by nuclear or hydro/solar/wind etc. I am thinking of something like $50/KWh for non-nuclear electricity. You could also outlaw the use of heating oil and natural gas or ration it to very small amounts per household. Or combustion based home heating systems including fireplaces could be outlawed. Instead those who live in cold climates would be required to install electric heating (or use electric space heaters) so that the electricity could either be highly taxed or generated from nuclear sources. Can you imagine the increase in property values for houses already in areas with electricity from nuclear sources?
Humans and other animals create CO2. I would imagine that with so many billions of people on the planet that we contribute a rather large amount of it to the atmosphere. Expensive permits could be required for exercising since running or playing sports or just being a male and especially a large male means producing more than your fair share of CO2. So anyone in excess of a certain weight (say 120 lbs) could pay a greenhouse tax of say $1000 per year for every 20 lbs over 120. In addition you could institute a 1 child per family rule and require an expensive permit even for that one child. Just imagine the amount of CO2 produced by a human over their lifetimes.
If we really are in that much danger of destroying all life on earth then these sorts of actions would be necessary. You could even make it simple and just outlaw combustion of any kind and institute the death penalty for anyone caught violating the For the Future of our Children anti-greenhouse gas laws.
At the very least very strong penalties would be a prerequisite for even the slightest chance of enforcing these sorts of regulations. I am thinking at least 10 years in prison for minor violations or executions for harder to enforce rules (like the use of combustion for home heating) or the possession of heating oil or wood (under the "intent to combust" statute).
I can't help wondering if the people supporting such measures are really thinking through all the specific implications of what would be required. They seem to believe that all that would be required to stop global warming in its tracks would be to outlaw SUVs or something. They never seem to want to get specific. And only a minority seem to be in favor of going nuclear on an immense scale with nuclear reactors in every neighborhood. If we really want to significantly reduce "greenhouse gas" production replacing every single one of our electric plants with nuclear plants and then outlawing all combustion in horseless carriages would at least be a realistic start. One that really would be more than just Green Theater. Take what you want, God said, and pay for it. The problem with most environmentalists is they don't believe in the second part or they believe that only the super-rich will be paying. I just don't understand this sort of thinking.
They're fine with destroying the earth I wasn't aware that we had the power to destroy the earth. Is there some tech that I am unaware of? In The Forge of God Greg Bear suggested a mechanism for doing this that seemed at least somewhat plausible to me, however we are nowhere near being able to manipulate exotic block hole or neutron star matter in that way. We can't even do interstellar travel yet to make it to one of those exotic collapsed stars let alone figure out a way to bring some of the material back with us. In my case I really am fine with destroying the earth. I think it would be super cool, but tend to doubt that most people would be in favor of it. Do you have any evidence to suggest that there really is a large pro-armageddon segment of the population that I haven't noticed?
That reminds me. One potential use for GPGPU is in running a neural net. For instance, even without crossfire or SLI a second video card could be used just for neural net processing for game character AI for instance. Graphics cards are a lot more brain-like than CPUs.
I'm not asking for a redefinition of the term 'intelligence' I'm asking for a specific, or even precise definition, of the term. I think you know exactly what we mean when we talk about intelligence. I think you already knew without having to look the word up in the dictionary. We are so far away from the overall goal that we really don't need such a precise definition anyway. A machine that could demonstrate even the slightest spark of the intelligence that even a dog has would be a... I don't even know what to call it. A revelation. We would be able to claim at least a small success. You are asking the equivalent of "but how will we know when we get there?" My answer is that it doesn't matter. We will know. That is not the problem. I understand the whole a question well asked is half answered thing, and I agree that that the more specific the goal the easier it is to reach. But in this case the dictionary definition is serving to only muddy the waters. Our lack of progress has nothing to do with researchers not agreeing upon a definition of "intelligent". Our goals are not specific. They are general.
My argument is that the computer can approach true AI if we define the problems and aggregate the possible tools to solve the problem. But the problems have already been defined well enough. What we need are some solutions. Some viable ideas on how to achieve them. We seem to be lacking the tools to even begin. We want to create a machine that can learn from its experience. One that can gather information from its perceptions and make rules/generalizations which it can test against the outside world to see if they are right. One that can organize the vast amounts of data from the outside world into useful categories. One that can learn by example, from mimicry, as well as didactically from explicit instruction, from if-then statements. A machine that can store and reproduce all or most of its sensory data and even "imagine" changes to that sensory data which it can output in speech or writing. A machine that can use some form of language or even a series of images to communicate with us. You want to know how we will know when we achieve an intelligent machine? When you interact with it and it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Does the machine have to pass some kind of Turing Test? Not necessarily. We just want a machine that can learn and organize information on its own. Have you ever seen the videos of the African Grey Parrot, Alex with her teacher, Irene Pepperberg? That's the kind of thing we would be looking for from our machine.
Machine Intelligence as a science hasn't even begun. Maybe in a few hundred years we will have developed the tools to begin to create a machine that can "think" in some limited way. Or maybe not. Just because something exists in nature doesn't mean we can recreate that thing. Will we ever be able to make a star for instance? I doubt it. We can't even begin to imagine how such a thing could be possible.
We don't really need to model the human brain to make an intelligent machine any more than we need to model a bird in order to make a flying machine. It's just an example (albeit our only one) of one possible solution. Nature typically has many different designs to do the same job. Nature is random and pragmatic in its solutions. We may never know how the brain really works. We may have to accept that the brain simply cannot be reverse engineered. Or maybe it will only take a millennium or two before we have some basic understanding of it.
People talk about all the computer power needed to simulate a human brain at reasonable speeds, but speed is really beside the point. If we could create a machine intelligence that could only make one intelligent response per decade we would have done it already. Even with computers 100,000 times more powerful than what we have now we still would not have a clue about how to build a machine with intelligence.
I don't know how or even if we will finally create a machine intelligence, but I know how we won't do it. It won't be just a computer program, isolated from the world. It won't be merely through advances in silicon or some kind of optronic quantum supercomputer architecture. It will be an artificial organism. Artificial life. It will have senses: sight, hearing, maybe touch and smell. Maybe it will have movement in order to explore its world. Creating that initial spark, that core to begin gathering data from the world is the core of the problem. And it is not a problem we are really any closer to solving. As we advance further in biology and genetics and bio-electronics we may see a way forward that wouldn't make any sense to us now.
I'm sure Douglas Lenat [wikipedia.org] would disagree that AI is dead. I remember when his project first started. What he was attempting was very ambitious and exciting. The only problem: it never led anywhere. It didn't lead to a computer with common sense or any sort of general knowledge. It didn't really lead to anything much of practical value. And rather than bringing us closer to an intelligent machine, it showed us just how far away from that dream we really are. I don't think he would regard it as any sort of unqualified success. He may say that it was a success for financial reasons because he spun off his university research into a commercial project. But his project was anything but a success. Unless the goal was yet another lesson about how difficult the goal of machine intelligence really is.
It's not that AI has been abandoned, it's just that the definition is a bit of a moving goalpost. So the goal has not been "abandoned" it has just been "moved"? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see such a great difference. And every once in a while you hear about someone attempting to simulate part of the human brain. The fact is we know almost nothing about how the brain works. Lots of stuff that we used to think we knew about the brain turned out to be wrong. We don't even have a method for even beginning to figure out how it works. It would be like figuring out how a computer works by weighing it, physically examining it, and measuring its RF emissions. We have built some crude models of how we think some of its basic building blocks work, but we are like cavemen probing an Intel E8400 chip with a stick. No matter how clever the cavemen might be they are never going to figure out how it works that way. They don't have any of the tools or the knowledge to even begin to discover anything about how it works.
So you are saying that our path to success is to just give up on the problem entirely? To redefine it out of existence? How does that get us any closer to creating Hal?
And despite what you say, renaming the goal of AI to something less ambitious, to something other than a machine that thinks, to make it smell like victory for the human species doesn't make it any less of an utter failure. I know that you know this, but emotions are more important than truth for most humans as many in this thread are demonstrating. AI is one of the more obvious failures of the human species, but emotionally we don't like failure. Solution: just redefine the problem to something we can already do well.
Artificial intelligence is all about hubris. I have a 9 year old nephew who is one of the dumbest human beings I have ever encountered, but he seems to think he is intelligent. He lacks the intelligence to see that he lacks it. That is like the human species. We lack the insight to see that there are some things we may not be intelligent enough to achieve. So we try to scale down the problem domain, simplify it so that maybe we can achieve it.
We are excellent at creating Artificial Stupidity, because stupidity is what we are good at, what we know. I have been observing the field of AI for about 25 years. We have failed. Period. There is no way around it. Oh sure we have done the easy stuff. Our voice synthesis has reached a point that the voices can almost pass for human. We have pretty good voice recognition. Handwriting recognition. IOW, the lowest of the low hanging fruit. We can nearly achieve Hal's voice. But that was never really the problem. Our Hal would have nothing at all to say.
Chimpanzees can use simple tools: a stick to catch termites. But how would they even begin to make a flying machine or a submarine? We were once like them. Maybe in a few million years we will have evolved to a point where we can figure things out that today we couldn't even conceive of due to our utter stupidity. For now we are like chimpanzees tracing a bird in the sand, not understanding why it can't fly.
The examples you give from conventional programming are only examples of "intelligence" if you so redefine the word as to be meaningless. Which seems to be the entire point of your post. It is true that some of our "advances" (and I use the term loosely) in conventional programming originally started out as problems that people in the AI field were interested in. All that demonstrates is that AI researchers did not sit around doing nothing. They worked on some problems that seemed solvable. They were hoping that by solving some of those easy problems that it would bring them closer to the goal of an intelligent machine, but that didn't happen. Which is the point.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually look you can find countries where very attractive women care more about the guys personality and how he cares about them than what he looks like.
Hmmm. I've traveled quite widely and I haven't noticed such a phenomenon. Although if you substitute "personality and how he cares about them" with "money", you may be on the right track at least in some of the very poor 3rd world countries. I will agree that very few women in the world are as 'shallow' in the sense of only caring about looks (and finding intelligence to be a huge turn off) as North American women.
By contrast, 2000 compared to 98 for most people was just slower...
But this would have been equally true for XP.
That's snappy answers. Al Jaffee is rolling in his grave.
So the sailing analogy breaks down pretty fast. Too bad we can't just stick some kind of fin into the aether.
Even if we could make antimatter cheaply and on a large scale it still isn't very practical for interstellar travel. The distances are just so unimaginably immense. There isn't yet even a theoretical substance that could propel us to the stars within a human lifetime and then have enough "fuel" to slow down again. Surely everyone has read that NASA "warp drive when" link by now. I'm getting tired of posting it. The idea is that we really need a true "space drive" for practical interstellar travel. Rocket technology regardless of the fuel just isn't going to do it.
Stupid disney and their stupid wooden ships in outer space.
And stupid children too dumb to even think about questioning any of it.
The Land of the Fee?
Amendments 1-10, okay, but the purpose of the Constitution isn't to defend anyone's rights, it's to limit the roles and responsibilities of the federal government.
Fixed it for you. The founders were essentially Libertarians.
If I was going to pay for the content that I download, I would want my money going to the people who made it, not people who maintain a network of stolen goods.
And exactly how are you going to do that? With a "donate" button on the artist's website maybe?
Strangely enough chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons would be a lot more effective in actually overthrowing the US government. Can you imagine another civil war, but this time with nukes and weaponized Marburg/Ebola/Lassa? Small arms would be of limited use against even the police force let alone the military. That's not to say that I wouldn't prefer to die shooting rather than being executed by the 2026 government for file sharing.
You are aware that the founders were pretty much all what today we would call Libertarians. Without a doubt they would see our current government as a tyranny beyond imagination. Pretty much their entire intent was to protect the citizens against the government, an institution that they regarded basically as evil. If they could see us today no doubt all of their worst fears would be confirmed. In fact I think they would regard their attempt at keeping their new republic free to be an utter failure. They had far more freedom under British rule than we have today. All of their elaborate measures, their "checks and balances" to prevent government growth, in the long run really served to accomplish very little. Our freedoms are not much different from the England that they fought so hard to be free of. Today they would surely be regarded as terrorists by most people. These are people who fought a major war over a small tax. Even I regard that as a little extreme.
Does Mexico have gun control laws? I'd definitely prefer to be carrying a gun in mexico city. I think a lot of people in favor of gun control are people who have never been mugged or assaulted in the street. There are some places that I have vowed I would never return without at least pepper spray. But I would feel safer with a gun. The biggest problem with a gun though is that you tend to kill the person that you shoot. So it is a very serious step to take. You have to really believe that they are going to actually kill you, and it is difficult to be sure of that even if they are pointing a gun at you. I suppose the only thing that would REALLY make me feel confident in a bad neighborhood would be an armed suitcase nuke with a dead man's switch. Then they can kill me all they want and I'll still get my revenge
Actually I don't make too many assumptions about what environmentalists are thinking. If they don't want to seem stupid then maybe they should stop saying dumb things like "we are going to destroy the earth". There is little evidence to support the idea that a warmer planet would be the end of the human species. I think a world government enforced ban on combustion would be more likely to destroy our species. If they can advocate a return to pre-industrial civilization along with a police state to enforce it all, it's pretty hard to guess what is going on their heads. Now you might claim that no one is advocating that, but to me that just makes it worse, because other than most of the world moving to nuclear for all electricity generation and going electric with all transportation, there is not much else that can really be done to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. To fix the problem it would be necessary to significantly reduce or eliminate combustion products of all kinds. That's not just going back to the middle ages. That's going back to the pre-history before even fire was invented. Is having hundreds of thousands of nuclear plants all running at full capacity to supply the constantly increasing energy needs of the world a safer world than one with a growing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Maybe it is. But it really depends on stuff we don't know yet. I would welcome nuclear plants in every neighborhood. Why don't the environmentalists typically agree? Another reason why I can't figure them out. If they really want a solution to the problem they should be the biggest nuclear power advocates out there and would even be willing to live near nuclear waste disposal sites. After all the alternative is Armegeddon, right?
What exactly does "grenhouse gas regulation" mean anyway? Whatever laws were passed would need to have some pretty serious teeth in order to enforce. Basic human needs are being met with greenhouse gas production. Getting people to go against their own survival needs and suffer great hardship for this abstract idea of "saving the planet" is not going to be easy. I guess you could just raise federal gas taxes to a very high (I am thinking $30/gallon) level. That should at least somewhat reduce CO2 emmision from car exhaust. Only the rich would be able to afford to drive a car or use non nuclear-electric public transportation. Also create a huge tax on all electricity that is not created by nuclear or hydro/solar/wind etc. I am thinking of something like $50/KWh for non-nuclear electricity. You could also outlaw the use of heating oil and natural gas or ration it to very small amounts per household. Or combustion based home heating systems including fireplaces could be outlawed. Instead those who live in cold climates would be required to install electric heating (or use electric space heaters) so that the electricity could either be highly taxed or generated from nuclear sources. Can you imagine the increase in property values for houses already in areas with electricity from nuclear sources?
Humans and other animals create CO2. I would imagine that with so many billions of people on the planet that we contribute a rather large amount of it to the atmosphere. Expensive permits could be required for exercising since running or playing sports or just being a male and especially a large male means producing more than your fair share of CO2. So anyone in excess of a certain weight (say 120 lbs) could pay a greenhouse tax of say $1000 per year for every 20 lbs over 120. In addition you could institute a 1 child per family rule and require an expensive permit even for that one child. Just imagine the amount of CO2 produced by a human over their lifetimes.
If we really are in that much danger of destroying all life on earth then these sorts of actions would be necessary. You could even make it simple and just outlaw combustion of any kind and institute the death penalty for anyone caught violating the For the Future of our Children anti-greenhouse gas laws.
At the very least very strong penalties would be a prerequisite for even the slightest chance of enforcing these sorts of regulations. I am thinking at least 10 years in prison for minor violations or executions for harder to enforce rules (like the use of combustion for home heating) or the possession of heating oil or wood (under the "intent to combust" statute).
I can't help wondering if the people supporting such measures are really thinking through all the specific implications of what would be required. They seem to believe that all that would be required to stop global warming in its tracks would be to outlaw SUVs or something. They never seem to want to get specific. And only a minority seem to be in favor of going nuclear on an immense scale with nuclear reactors in every neighborhood. If we really want to significantly reduce "greenhouse gas" production replacing every single one of our electric plants with nuclear plants and then outlawing all combustion in horseless carriages would at least be a realistic start. One that really would be more than just Green Theater. Take what you want, God said, and pay for it. The problem with most environmentalists is they don't believe in the second part or they believe that only the super-rich will be paying. I just don't understand this sort of thinking.
That reminds me. One potential use for GPGPU is in running a neural net. For instance, even without crossfire or SLI a second video card could be used just for neural net processing for game character AI for instance. Graphics cards are a lot more brain-like than CPUs.
Sometimes 5 points are really not enough. Parent post should be at +15. Insightful as hell.
Machine Intelligence as a science hasn't even begun. Maybe in a few hundred years we will have developed the tools to begin to create a machine that can "think" in some limited way. Or maybe not. Just because something exists in nature doesn't mean we can recreate that thing. Will we ever be able to make a star for instance? I doubt it. We can't even begin to imagine how such a thing could be possible.
We don't really need to model the human brain to make an intelligent machine any more than we need to model a bird in order to make a flying machine. It's just an example (albeit our only one) of one possible solution. Nature typically has many different designs to do the same job. Nature is random and pragmatic in its solutions. We may never know how the brain really works. We may have to accept that the brain simply cannot be reverse engineered. Or maybe it will only take a millennium or two before we have some basic understanding of it.
People talk about all the computer power needed to simulate a human brain at reasonable speeds, but speed is really beside the point. If we could create a machine intelligence that could only make one intelligent response per decade we would have done it already. Even with computers 100,000 times more powerful than what we have now we still would not have a clue about how to build a machine with intelligence.
I don't know how or even if we will finally create a machine intelligence, but I know how we won't do it. It won't be just a computer program, isolated from the world. It won't be merely through advances in silicon or some kind of optronic quantum supercomputer architecture. It will be an artificial organism. Artificial life. It will have senses: sight, hearing, maybe touch and smell. Maybe it will have movement in order to explore its world. Creating that initial spark, that core to begin gathering data from the world is the core of the problem. And it is not a problem we are really any closer to solving. As we advance further in biology and genetics and bio-electronics we may see a way forward that wouldn't make any sense to us now.
So you are saying that our path to success is to just give up on the problem entirely? To redefine it out of existence? How does that get us any closer to creating Hal?
And despite what you say, renaming the goal of AI to something less ambitious, to something other than a machine that thinks, to make it smell like victory for the human species doesn't make it any less of an utter failure. I know that you know this, but emotions are more important than truth for most humans as many in this thread are demonstrating. AI is one of the more obvious failures of the human species, but emotionally we don't like failure. Solution: just redefine the problem to something we can already do well.
Artificial intelligence is all about hubris. I have a 9 year old nephew who is one of the dumbest human beings I have ever encountered, but he seems to think he is intelligent. He lacks the intelligence to see that he lacks it. That is like the human species. We lack the insight to see that there are some things we may not be intelligent enough to achieve. So we try to scale down the problem domain, simplify it so that maybe we can achieve it.
We are excellent at creating Artificial Stupidity, because stupidity is what we are good at, what we know. I have been observing the field of AI for about 25 years. We have failed. Period. There is no way around it. Oh sure we have done the easy stuff. Our voice synthesis has reached a point that the voices can almost pass for human. We have pretty good voice recognition. Handwriting recognition. IOW, the lowest of the low hanging fruit. We can nearly achieve Hal's voice. But that was never really the problem. Our Hal would have nothing at all to say.
Chimpanzees can use simple tools: a stick to catch termites. But how would they even begin to make a flying machine or a submarine? We were once like them. Maybe in a few million years we will have evolved to a point where we can figure things out that today we couldn't even conceive of due to our utter stupidity. For now we are like chimpanzees tracing a bird in the sand, not understanding why it can't fly.
The examples you give from conventional programming are only examples of "intelligence" if you so redefine the word as to be meaningless. Which seems to be the entire point of your post. It is true that some of our "advances" (and I use the term loosely) in conventional programming originally started out as problems that people in the AI field were interested in. All that demonstrates is that AI researchers did not sit around doing nothing. They worked on some problems that seemed solvable. They were hoping that by solving some of those easy problems that it would bring them closer to the goal of an intelligent machine, but that didn't happen. Which is the point.