On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 07:41:57PM -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
> Nah, its dressing up metaphysics as science that's distasteful. As
> far as AI goes, my suspicions have a very practical basis. Since its
> been about 5 years now and I left the company involved, I guess I can
> name the school. Several professors from MIT came and sold AI as a
> solution to my former company. Those of us responsible for working
> with them kept on trying to pin them down, but they wouldn't talk
> specifics. They kept on talking in general buzz words. Anyone who's
> a practical scientist/engineer would have said "smoke and mirrors"
> within 15 minutes. Luckily, we got out of working with them. Another
> division, after spending 5 million got a nifty report.
>
> These guys are name AI folks at a major university. Their failure to
> do more than smoke and mirrors. This has not been the first time the
> oil industry has been sold down the river by AI proponents. If you
> think that having a dim view of the present state of AI as a result of
> this is just lowering my standards, so be it. For my part, I think it
> is just part of being an experimentalist. :-)
My reading of the criticism was that William was referring to your
belief that there is something special/magical/divine about human
intelligence and consciousness.
The other alternative being that human intelligence and consciousness is
simply a very complicated computational and input/output system.
It is well established that the current hardware level of silicon-based
AI does not have the power to simulate/model the full complexity of the
human brain. But it is simply a matter of numbers: bits and Hertz. One
day, the hardware -- be it silicon or some other synthetic computational
technology -- will probably reach the needed complexity. At that
point, I think it is reasonable to assume that we can build/train a
human-equivalent AI.
I'd say that this latter viewpoint is a more scientific and empirical
one than the former. Do you disagree?
--
"Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.com/
