Jed,
Interesting so far, Jones. I look forward to seeing the rest. Maybe you should upload it somewhere, to preserve the formatting.
I am looking around for an appropriate forum on Yahoo groups but haven't found anything yet. Maybe Frank will let me co-op with his aether group for a few weeks, and put it in his files section?
I discussed this subject a little in the book, in Chapter 10. I only said a little because I only know a little.
Yes, AI does go hand-in-hand with a CF power source. Any futurologist must somehow deal with the implications of "strong AI," even if it should not materialize ... and there are many camps staking claim to certain views of strong, stronger, and oops - new dominant species.
There was so much hype a decade ago with the popularity of William Gibson, and others in popular culture, but they only seemed to fuel the disappointment which became known as the "AI winter" of the next decade up to recently. The dot.bomb crash did not help much. Funding disappeared except for fuzzy logic, which is far from AI, a joke really. But now AI seems to be once again making its meme-presence known.
A recent issue of Scientific American had a fascinating story about brains, comparing the number of neurons and operations to a contemporary computer.
Yes, but I think they were over-aggrandizing the average human capability. Also a couple of weeks ago in New Scientist is a good story about "Whatever happened to machines that think?"
April 23, 2005 by Justin Mullins
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18624961.700
Which is basically about Cyc.
When I wrote the manuscript, I was strongly influenced by the work of Doug Lenat, an enigmatic fellow who got significant funding for a while but not nearly enough to finish the project. NS says: "After being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced "psych") will be put online for the world to interact with. And it's only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it Hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute."
It's kind of like Wiki-on-steroids and with a logic core, "Cyc's creator says it has developed a human trait no other AI system has managed to imitate: common sense. "I believe we are heading towards a singularity and we will see it in less than 10 years," says Doug Lenat of Cycorp, the system's creator." [ but he said the same thing 15 years ago]
As Jed mentions the biggest disappoint of all, has been in **speech recognition.** (parsing, act). I thought sure, absolutely sure, that because of the positive economic incentives, we would have this important stepping stone in place by 2000, but the cheap computer power which was needed was just not there yet. It does take teraflop capability, it seems.
Needless to say, that is why the recent introduction of the XBox 360 got me thinking along these same lines again. And yes... Look for a real "talker" ... not AI but a really robust machine that will pass the Turing test and more within three years... if the XBox can do the job.
But alas, it seemed like the timetable for AI in the mid-90s was much more accelerated that it turned out to be, so who knows.
Once all the pieces fall into place, however, people will be blown away by the implications... if it's not already too late by then to maintain our place in evolution's next shakeout and new pecking order.
Jones
