Marvin Minsky On AI 231
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."
WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO (Score:2, Informative)
Re:real AI is a long way off (Score:3, Informative)
"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."
Do you think that we humans use some sort of Quantum Coherence to maintain very short decision chains? If so, where in a cell would be stable for such temporary coherence be maintained? Theories suggest that microtubules MIGHT be able to hold containment, but most experts say 'probably not'.
However, to hold that theory, a recent study [americanscientist.org] found that water does really weird things in carbon nanotubules with 4 gigapascals @ 250 K. H2O helixes are quite interesting, and do show promise to any sort of quantum processing in cells.
Direct links (Score:4, Informative)
in 2001, *indeed* (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Its 2001. Where's HAL? (Score:2, Informative)
Coordination Lacking (Score:5, Informative)
* Physical modeling
* Analogy application
* Formal logic
* Pattern recognition
* Language parsing
* Memory
* Others that I forgot
It takes connectivity and cordination between just about all of these. Lab AI has done pretty well at each of these alone, but has *not* found way to make them help each other.
Re:Erm.. (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, the bogosity (Score:5, Informative)
In the 1980s I believed that "strong AI" was forthcoming...
In the 1980s, I was going through Stanford CS, where some of the AI faculty were indeed saying that. Read Feigenbaum's "The Fifth Generation", to see how bad it got. It was embarrassing, because very little actually worked.. Expert systems really were awfully dumb. They're just another way to program, as is generally recognized today. But back then, there were people claiming that if you could only write enough rules, intelligence would somehow emerge. I knew it was bogus at the time, and so did some other people, but, unlike most grad students, I was working for an big outside company, not a professor, and could say so. At one point I noted that it was possible to graduate in CS, in AI, at the MSCS level, without ever actually seeing an expert system work. This embarrassed some faculty members.
There was a massive amount of self-delusion in Stanford CS back then. When the whole AI boom collapsed, CS at Stanford was moved from the School of Arts and Sciences to Engineering, to give the place some adult supervision. Eventually, the Stanford AI Lab was dissolved. It's been brought back in the last few years, but with new people.
We're making real progress today, finally. Mainly because of a shift to statistical methods with sound mathematical underpinnings, plus enough compute power to make them go. Trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus was a dead end. But number crunching is working. Computer vision actually sort of works now. Robots are starting to work. Automatic driving works. Language translation works marginally. Voice recognition works marginally. There are real products now.
But the AI field really was stuck for over a decade. The phrase "AI Winter" has been used.
Re:another one? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO (Score:2, Informative)
the human mind ~is~ like a computer.
read "godel escher bach: an eternal golden braid" for a fun and enlightening journey into the nature of minds and machines.
or rather.. how about a rebuttal from "the man" himself:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/dreyfu
jmc rocks. what did dreyfus ever do?
Link (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ah yes Marvin Minsky? (Score:4, Informative)
What do most of us care about computer visions and computational linguistics, it's all just statistics ans formulas, it doesn't teach us enough about ourselves.
That's not to say it isn't interesting work but IMHO it has nothing to do with "Intelligence" (artificial or not, human vision is heavily based on pre-defined brain structures that take care of most of the filtering and pre-processing and has very little to do with being intelligent or not either). The big mistake is that somebody chose to apply the term AI to those fields of investigation anyway even though it's a complete misnomer.
Personally I think AI should be used to refer to the investigation of what makes us "Intelligent" (well, at least some of us
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)