I have thought about this at length.. not that i claim to have any great insight.. other than, even if we could do it, there is no real point to making machines "behave like man". Most of the early AI dreams seemed very arrogant and self-absorbed. Making software that could "pretend to be human" was the highest goal of machines. We have plenty of humans who are good at being humans. Sure, there is room for improvement with user-interfaces and computer-human interaction. This is a worthy goal.
With "AI" it's so easy to talk in abstract. I don't think we should confuse "general intelligence" with "human characteristics". We should start capitalising on what machines are good at and help them organise data and functionality (code) more effectively. Not this hodge-podge of operating systems, applications and file formats that we have today. I'm not trying to discount anyone's dream. I have my own dream that I'm been (unsuccessfully) trying to achieve in some small way. I don't think the future is HAL 9000.. but i certainly hope it's not SQL and PHP either. I look to science fiction and stuff like "max headroom" and "minority report". The "system" is homogenous and connected and it just works. It's not HTTP 404 errors and microsoft office. But to the original point, I do see Java as a potential platform were we can achieve such things simply because it's a virtual machine that "is a turing machine". Classes can be written with minimal side effects and dependencies. "pure" code if you will. you can argue the type system and other semantics, but it does have this going for it. I was thinking recently about the difference between pragmatism and idealism. I think we need to be pragmatic in our approaches but ultimately idealistic in our goals. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
