THE SEARCH FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Bethell, Tom
by Tom Bethell N A SEMI-OFFICIAL WAY, the search for artificial intelligence began 50 years ago. In the summer of 1956, a two-month conference at Dartmouth College set out to explore "the...
...Was Napoleon famous...
...she said, in some alarm...
...And so it went...
...Before we can reach "human level," McCarthy said by way of summary, the field of AI needs new ideas and new thinking...
...Brooks praised the 1956 conference, at which "an audacious, outrageous even, intellectual Zeitgeist emerged: that the core of humanity, our ability to think and reason, was subject to our own technological understanding," And, he added: "The participants were right...
...Berkeley (philosophy...
...Feeding common sense into computers has turned out to be extraordinarily difficult...
...In 1972 he published a book, What Computers Can'tDo, and updated it as What Computers Still Can'tDo (1992...
...All the Caltech computer firepower in Carver's lab.., could not even scratch the surface of the evident superiority and continuing inscrutability of the eye, brain and nervous system of the fly...
...In his excellent book AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence Daniel Crevier wrote that a consortium funded by a number of corporations began its task in the following fashion: Researchers started by lifting pairs of sentences at random from newspapers, encyclopedias and magazine articles...
...Was Isaac Newton famous...
...But they had the last laugh when Dreyfus, not a good chess player, made the mistake of taking on an early chess program, MaeHack, and losff Another and more widely respected critic of AI is John Searle, also of Berkeley's philosophy department...
...But when we get down to the question, 'Is there real understanding present?' we will have to concede that there isn't...
...Having evolved minds of their own, computers then will make a far more rapid progress...
...The unsigned prospectus for the conference tells a story that seems to cast doubt on the claim that the founders really were "right" in 1956: Despite its advances in the last 50 years, it is clear that the original goals set by the first generation of AI visionaries have not been reached...
...McCarthy once told Searle that a thermostat has three "beliefs": "It's too hot in here, it's too cold in here, and it's just right in here...
...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31 "-I - r m m Z -H --I 0 i--< r - t - O 0 - I - r m i'Pi - r "TI 0 - I - r l m r,J .ram I - " Z I'PI / . - I ' - m rl'l Z I T I TOM BETHELL The New Scientist reported earlier this year that Cyc now contains around 300,000 concepts, "such as 'sky' and 'blue,' and around 3 million different assertions, such as 'the sky is blue,' in a format that can be used by computers to make deductions...
...He was also at MIT, and as a RAND consultant made many enemies with a paper under the thinktank's imprint comparing AI to alchemy...
...If you steal a string, its owner might be annoyed...
...A "significant advance" has been made in solving some problems "now reserved for humans...
...So that didn't look too promising...
...Ada Lovelace, a precocious student of mathematics herself, understood his machine, even though she saw only a partial model of it...
...She is sometimes called the "first computer programmer...
...sometimes they can diagnose diseases...
...He's coming along, but if you look at Cyc, it still can't do any extensive amount of 5year-old type common sense reasoning...
...His colleagues have not looked upon him kindly, and according to MIT's Joseph Weizenbaum, the AI community there gave Dreyfus "the silent treatment...
...That's why you'll find that these robotics people treasure their videos-because it won't work tomorrow...
...This will happen by 2029, he thinks...
...I formed the impression that after 50 years on the case, AI may no longer absorb him as it once did...
...Earth--one evolving far more rapidly than biology would ever permit...
...But when enough of those neurons were put together with enough complexity, all of a sudden you got.., us...
...In 15 years they've discovered 5 things (giving them the benefit of the doubt...
...Byron had left England right after her birth and they never met again...
...Computers have not yet passed the Turing test...
...Over 160 years later, despite much effort by Ph.D.s from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and an ever increasing number of universities, no one has ever shown her comment to be out of date--inapplicable to today's computers...
...I told him I had read that computer programs had had difficulties stacking children's bricks...
...By the end of the 20th century, he believed, "one will be able to speak of machines thinkingwithout expectingto be contradicted...
...Although the emergence of consciousness from exactly the right combination of electronics and software is not impossible, he added, the same could be said of its emergence from "exactly the right combination of mozzarella and tomato sauce, or bricks and mortar, or cardboard and rubber cement...
...Within a few years McCarthy had moved on to Stanford University and Minsky to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...A look at the current landscape of research reveals how little we know about how biological brains achieve their remarkable functionalities, how these functionalities develop in the child, or how they have arisen in the course of evolution...
...But we are not at that level yet...
...So let's give him another nine years...
...But robots would try to put the top brick in place first, not "understanding" that other bricks must "stand under" it...
...It was a young fox going at what looked to be about 20 miles an hour, with utter self-assurance and with hardly any light to steer by...
...In The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky said that "minds are simply what brains do...
...It is more a reflection of declining artistic standards than the emerging creativity of machinery...
...A professor of Computer _9 Science at Yale, he was wounded when he opened a package mailed by the Unabomber in 1993...
...But you don't know why because next time it won't...
...Another leading participant and coauthor of the grant proposal was Marvin Minsky, who was a junior fellow in mathematics at Harvard...
...She wrote up detailed notes describing his thoughts and ideas, and it is through her efforts that we know most of what we do know about Babbage's intentions...
...After all, we did, and with very humble beginnings...
...His father, Herbert Gelernter, who was a cofounder of the field and present at the Dartmouth conference, had worked on the "applied" side and developed a "geometry-theorem proving machine" in the 1950s...
...Getting a fictional computer to think is a problem that has been solved in a thousand novels, and all AI researchers seem to have read Sci-Fi in their spare time...
...The gulf that 50 years of research has unmistakably revealed suggests that older ideas, long discardednotably dualism, or the separation of mind and matter into different kinds of substances-should be restored...
...T HE DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED by Cyc, and the related "frame problem," are of interest even if computer programmers can't solve them, because they have indirectly taught us a lot about what humans know and how soon we know it...
...The successful completion of the course in the Moj ave Desert had given McCarthy aboost...
...They will remain our obedient servants, surely becoming more and more reliable and with an ever widening range of applications, As to their becoming "intelligent," I guess that will never happen...
...By the way, is the sky blue...
...You probably shouldn't eat string and if you tie a box with it, you should have put the stuff in it before...
...He is the same age as McCarthy-both are now 78...
...Even so, he was disappointed that the rules had simplified the task...
...and complex if all relevant changes have to be spelled out...
...I was reminded of George Gilder's comments on the fly, as studied by an assistant to Carver Mead at Caltech a few years ago...
...Computers could do what the mind does, in other words...
...It is more a reflection of declining artistic standards than the emerging creativity of machinery...
...Here, the younger generation is in charge, and Rodney Brooks, 51, is on the program committee...
...Because basic theories of natural intelligence are lacking and-despite impressive advances--the required technologies for building sophisticated artificial systems are still not available, the capabilities of current robots fall far short of the intelligence of even very simple animals...
...In 1969, McCarthy and an assistant from the University of Edinburgh (a leading center ofAI in Britain) found that in proving that one person could talk to another after looking up his phone number, "we were obliged to add the hypothesis that if a person has a telephone, he still has it after looking up a number in the telephone book...
...In my first proposals in the 1960s, I expected to accomplish things within three years that haven't been done to this day...
...This reflects the materialist worldview of almost all of the founding generation of AI researchers, including McCarthy, Simons, and Newell...
...How long will it take...
...and on the other hand performing a programmed 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2006 TOM BETHELL sequence of tasks in order to achieve a well-defined goal-"applied" AI...
...Yes-except when it isn't...
...TN THE GULF THAT HAS OPENED UP between human level | a n d applied AI, there is also a paradox...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery...
...A man who knows that murder is wrong because God says so is in a different position...
...There's a related difficulty called the "frame problem...
...But the seekers after artificial intelligence have been more ambivalent, because she wrote the following: The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything...
...In 1950 he devised what became known as the Turing test...
...Cognitive AI, on the other hand, "was bound to fail," David Gelernter went on...
...Stanley," as it was called, was one of five vehicles to finish...
...Then again, programmers had great difficulty in getting robots to do seemingly simple things such as pile up children's bricks...
...Maybe that's because computers really don't understand anything at allbutjust do what they're told...
...This allows them to produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that no one had previously uttered...
...Everything doubles in 18 months...
...The search for "strong AI" has been worthwhile, nonetheless, if only because the many unavailing attempts to replicate the human mind have made us more conscious of its marvels...
...Science fiction may eventually come to be seen as the true inspiration for much of AI, and the source both of its optimism and its frustration...
...Since 1984, Douglas Lenat and his team have been working on a project called Cyc (short for encyclopedia and pronounced "psyche") to encode in computers common-sense knowledge-the literally millions of things that children know before they go to grade school...
...But such inferences tend to be extremelyliteral minded, so that all consequences of a specified action have to be spelled out...
...Maybe they will learn from their environment--just as children do...
...No one in 2015 would dream of buying a machine without common sense...
...I don't see that--either as a characteristic of the past or of the future...
...Over the years, artificial intelligence has had more cheerleaders than critics, but one prominent naysayer has been Hubert Dreyfus of U.C...
...None of these things is impossible, but none of them is terribly likely either...
...In the summer of 1956, a two-month conference at Dartmouth College set out to explore "the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be s o precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it...
...By then, he believes, there will be "two intelligent species on Planet Most people who pursue artificial intelligence are materialists, he agreed, meaning that everything is assumed to be physical, the mind included...
...He is often referred to as the father of the computer...
...It was never completed in Babbage's lifetime...
...Nor would a computer that performed manipulations and answered in the same way...
...They were: "Napoleon died on St...
...HAL, for those who never saw the movie, was the malign computer in 2001 who decided to kill off the crew of the spaceship as it headed toward Jupiter...
...Most people who pursue artificial intelligence are 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2006 TOM BETHELL materialists, he agreed, meaning that everything is assumed to be physical, the mind included...
...It uses various criteria to help credit card companies decide whether a charge should be allowed, thereby reducing fraud...
...Of course, it would be very interesting to know how good the first mammals were...
...They booed when he talked, and he was very miffed...
...The best course is to go ahead and put the robots out there in the real world and hope for the best...
...It corresponds to the real world most of the time, but not all of the time...
...Understanding intelligence is "a hard scientific problem," he said...
...Alan Turing and his followers were hugely naive about the mind...
...In fact, it could "barely negotiate straight corridors," as Daniel Crevier noted...
...You want the machine to be able to crank through the logical deductions-the consequences of these assertions-the same way you or I would...
...Picking up cats-no...
...This may have gone to his head, for in The Age of Spiritual Machines he declared that "the emergence of machines that exceed human intelligence in all of its broad diversity is inevitable...
...It bothers me a lot that the sort ofthingbeing added apparently includes rules like 'A creature with two arms probably has two legs.' This seems out of control to me...
...Five out of 20 vehicles completed the course (the year before none had...
...They have been used commercially and that is why various companies support AI departments...
...A woman happened to be walking nearby and suddenly a swift blur crossed our path...
...Here's what Minsky said: Tell me something that you've learned from building a physical robot, and I'll tell you someone in the 1970s who wrote a big paper on that...
...government and by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, said in Crevier's book that Cyc had a good chance ofserving"as the foundation of the first true AI agent...
...Crevier reported that most AI researchers "don't believe it's going to work but can't help being fascinated by it...
...Listen to the atonal and non-metric exercises in pretension that we hear on public radio, and it's all too easy to believe that machines can imitate them...
...No reason has ever been adduced for believing that anyone will ever be able to build a conscious mind out of electronics...
...After a few such displacements an early robot called Shakey soon lost track of its location and would bump into walls...
...Picking up bricks--yes...
...It was and is absurd...
...T HERE'S ANOTHER 50TH ANNIVERSARY event this summer, this one in Switzerland, organized by an otherwise unidentified group called ASAI50...
...It is unlikely that anything will come of it...
...attracted four times as many hits as his "What Is AI...
...The successes of AI...
...But I do not see why silicon cannot make the same transition from unconsciousness to consciousness that carbon did...
...No GPS, lasers or computers on board...
...The following year Gelernter published The Muse in the Machine, in which he has some original things to say about the mind and creativity...
...Nonetheless, the method employed "doesn't correspond to human common sense knowledge about objects," he said...
...But the advance belongs in the realm of what is called "applied" artificial intelligence...
...He had been keeping up with the news, mentioning Richard Dawkins, Intelligent Design, and the Discovery Institute...
...Right off, he asked me if I was interested in "sustainability...
...I asked John McCarthy what he thought of this-Kurzweil's vision in particular...
...Not only is natural intelligence far from being understood and artificial forms of intelligence still so much more primitive than natural ones, but seemingly simple JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 THE SEARCH FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE tasks like object manipulation and recognitionwhich a a-year-old can do-have not yet been realized artificially...
...He is no doubt also correct that sending robots forth to blunder about in the world and learn by their mistakes is a counsel of despair...
...AmSome also say that computers can compose music and poems, but we need not take that seriously...
...If a human behind a screen cannot distinguish human from machine responses, then the machine must be considered intelligent...
...He became a "non-person...
...Well, some of the expert systems have been a great success," McCarthy said...
...They are not included in any book be cause they are so obvious...
...In fact, McCarthy's position seemed to be similar to Simon's...
...GPS had been allowed on board not to steer the cars, he said, only to make sure that they didn't go grossly off the road...
...There's been only one large project to do something about that [the common sense problem], and that's the famous Cyc project of Douglas Lenat in Austin...
...received the answer yes...
...Once a Marxist, McCarthy has moved considerably to the right over the years...
...In principle, why should that not eventually occur with silicon...
...McCarthy had touched on one of the great unsolved problems when he mentioned human "common sense knowledge...
...As a debutante in London in the 1830s, Ada was introduced to Charles Babbage, the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, who was absorbed by the idea of building a computer, or analytical engine, as he called it...
...How did that software get inside the animal's head...
...Applied AI has been a blow-out success," he said...
...The campus is deserted at that time of year (and night) and quite dark except for one or two dim lights...
...There are a few optimists, among them Marvin Minsky, who said in 2001: As far as I know, no computer knows that you can use a string to pull an object, but not to push it...
...When IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, he said at the time that he could feel "a new kind of intelligence across the table...
...In the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, with driverless vehicles navigating a course in the Mojave Desert, Stanford's entry, a modified VW Touareg, came in first...
...The fly, Gilder wrote in TheSilicon Eye, can do flawless flip landings on the edge of a glass or on a glass ceiling while scarcely slowing down...
...Judaism traditionally locates God at opposite ends of the cosmos, outside the universe and deep inside the mind...
...By then Lenat will be 65 and perhaps ready for retirement...
...But he "never claimed to be researchingthe human mind...
...Mind is what matter does, and can be reduced to molecules in motion...
...page, he told me...
...But as Gelernter said, why should silicon be any more plausible as a medium than cardboard...
...In 2002, Lenat told Computerworld that the Cyc project had put in "600 person-years of effort, and we've assembled aknowledge base containing3 million rules of thumb that the average person knows about the world, plus about 300,000 terms or concepts...
...They didn't realize that "building a mind simulator in software and expecting it to think made no more sense than the idea of building a 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2006 TOM BETHELL thunderstorm simulator and expecting it to get everyone wet (Searle's example...
...Bythe time 1985 rolled around, however, Simon had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, but thinking computers still hadn't appeared on the scene...
...A student of Marvin Minsky's at MIT, he developed voice-recognition software and other useful gadgets...
...In recent decades she has become the focus of both admiration and frustration among AI researchers...
...Researchers would watch children playing with bricks, and it looked so easy...
...Every now and then the robot will go down the hall and actually find a door and go through it, if that's what you're programming it to do...
...There are more and more of these applications, and more will come...
...He originated the LISP computer programming language and has won numerous awards in the field of computer science, including the Kyoto Prize...
...But sometimes they do change, and deciding when they do and when they don't and what changes are relevant turned out to be difficult...
...Ada was probably in her twenties when she wrote that plain statement, relegating computers to the status of slaves...
...His web page "What Is Marxism...
...Robots can perform tirelessly on assembly lines...
...Moreover, if that premise is true, then it surely does follow that mental activity is nothing more than some combination of neurons firing in the brain...
...Everyone accepts that applied AI has been a success...
...Some also say that computers can compose music and poems, but we need not take that seriously...
...All the links were to polemics against evolution, rather than taking their own ideas seriously...
...And if that combination can be replicated, then (it is assumed) the mind will have been re-created in the computer...
...Marvin Minsky is still on the MIT faculty-he is the Toshiba Professor of MediaArts and Sciences and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science ~ there--but Brooks now runs the AI Lab at MIT...
...His answer, given "from the standpoint of a practicing Jew," tried to marry materialism and religious faith (an awkward union): There's no reason God can't manipulate the plain physical stuff of the brain to produce an awareness of His presence, His justice, His sanctity...
...How did its computer get programmed...
...He gave the American Express "authorizer's assistant" as an example...
...Computers can do useful things like multiplication and division, and they are also very good at chess...
...Examples: people who die stay dead, nothing can be in two places at once, animals don't like pain, and so on...
...Rodney Brooks, the Panasonic Professor of Robotics and Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, added a more effusive comment...
...Central to human thought is what he calls the "cognitive spectrum," ranging from highly focused "analytic" thought down to "low focus," obliviouS-of-the-environment thought, verging on hallucination and dreams...
...The reigning "strong" AI enthusiast is Ray Kurzweil, the CEO of Kurzweil Technologies and a wellknown futurist...
...The conjecture that machines could be built with the ability to think had been made by the British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930s...
...The number of chips and complexity of their interaction will no doubt be staggering and may require centuries to construct...
...In fact, the "frame problem" raises basic questions about the applicability of formal logic to the analysis of everyday life...
...computers can decipher our voices over the telephone and respond with pre-recorded replies...
...I don't think Kurzweil has any basis for what he says about that," he replied...
...The truth is _Lthat computers can do quickly and easily those things that humans find it difficult to do, or can do only slowly-multiply two large numbers, for example...
...Q: Can you give an example...
...Wellington was saddened:' Through a complex hierarchy of interlocking frames, the researchers were able to impart to Cyc the knowledge that Napoleon was a person...
...Nor does it implythat consciousness per se is anything other than biological...
...There's still alongway to go, though...
...There's no science...
...In his books, notably The Society of Mind (1985) and The Emotion Machine (forthcoming, available at his website), Minsky seems mostly to be absorbed by experimental psychology...
...A: Terms like "first date" and rules of thumb like "People are more polite on their first date than they are on their nth date "Alot ofthes e things were true 50000 years ago, like "If you are carrying a container that's open on one side, you should carry it with the open end up...
...his frustration with robots was plain...
...No doubt we were all unduly impressed by those old room-sized computers depicted in 1960s cartoons...
...Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the materialist premise itself is just plain wrong...
...Searle responded that if he were put in a room equipped with Chinese symbols and a set of rules for manipulating them, and could use those rules to respond appropriately to questions with those symbols, he still would not understand a word of Chinese...
...Now emeritus, he has been a professor of Computer Science at Stanford since 1962...
...Despite more than 20 years' work, the Cyc project contains only about 2 percent of the information its designers think it needs to operate with something like human intelligence...
...It's consciousness of right and wrong that can't be accounted for biologically--or more precisely, the sort of consciousness that allows an honest man to compel other people to adhere to a moral code...
...The Rockefeller Foundation put up the money...
...Still, the success has been "very limited," McCarthy allowed...
...At the same time, computers cannot do at all those things that humans (and sometimes animals as well) can do easily, often without even having to think about them...
...But "deep inside the mind" doesn't necessarily imply dualism or epiphenomenalism...
...Using his "Chinese room" argument, Searle opposed the claim of John McCarthy and others that because computers can"responcF' as though theyhave thoughts or beliefs, they can be regarded as really having them...
...A problem analogous to the frame problem arises with robotics, but this time it is in the three-dimensional world, as opposed to a matter of literal-minded logic...
...I had seen something on his website about that...
...He argued that children have an innate knowledge ofabasic grammatical structure common to all human languages...
...As to machines forming abstractions on their own, there has been no progress...
...Children learn language so quickly that only an innate capacity can explain it, Chomsky said...
...It's just like ESP, meaning usually it doesn't work, but it works if you're happy enough to have a video...
...At least at the start, they didn't grasp the existence of mental states--of an inner mental world, intentional states, of consciousness...
...ong other things, McCarthy advocates the expansion of nuclear power...
...Chomsky's claim made him unpopular in AI circles...
...The hi-tech magazine Wired has offered us more of this hype, and journalists have mostly played along without a murmur...
...It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform...
...When Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001 was released, in 1968, Marvin Minsky (a consultant to JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 THE SEARCH FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Kubrick) predicted that "in 30 years we should have machines whose intelligence is comparable to man's...
...Minsky's contributions to the field seem to be quite original, perhaps because in thinking about what perceptual and mental problems we do in fact solve, he spelled out what experimental psychologists had often taken for granted (just as encyclopedia writers take common sense forgranted...
...Encouraged by tax subsidies, McCarthy told me, he put solar panels into the roof of his house some years ago, but they leaked and the company that installed them went out of business...
...The conference director, Dartmouth philosophy professor James Moor, sounds more cautious than his predecessors 50 years ago, modestly saying that this summer's event will "undertake a full exploration into the many emerging directions for future AI research, just as the College took the first steps to establish AI as a research discipline 50 years ago...
...In biology, neurons started firing millions of years ago, allowing tiny mindless organisms to move about, avoid noxious stimuli, etc...
...Both institutions have remained dominant in the AI field, both men have remained actively involved, and both will speak at '?kI @ 50;' agoldenjubilee conference to be held at Dartmouth in mid-July...
...This pattern of unwarranted optimism has persisted...
...So the student is wasting a whole year or three soldering connections and working with bad components...
...In fact, AI research has tended to validate the claims that MIT emeritus linguistics professor Noam Chomsky made about language decades ago...
...On the other hand, it may be 500 years...
...The four authors of the grant proposal addedoptimistically it turned out: "We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer...
...A rapid survey of the field over the last 50 years shows seemingly contradictory results...
...It divides what is often called "cognitive" and'"applied" artificial intelligence...
...He said robots these days can easily do that...
...Another Dartmouth participant, Herbert Simon, who (with Allen Newell) had already written a computer program that seemed to show that computers could "think," predicted (in 1965) that within 20 years machines would be capable of doing anything "that a man can do...
...His anti-technology diatribe, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," was a seven-day marvel, praised by techies who should have known better...
...Rodney Brooks, in charge of the AI Lab at MIT today, has been enamored of robots and has differed from the approach of McCarthy and Minsky, who wanted to establish a proper computational foundation before expecting too much from robots...
...Human minds and computer minds will somehow merge, thoughts will be downloadable, and an age of super-intelligence will commence...
...J OHN MCCARTHY LIVES on the Stanford campus and in January I went to see him...
...There's no replicable experiment...
...Not even dead cats...
...Sadness," as you can imagine, was quite a headache...
...Also, we do not understand the cultural and social processes that have helped to shape human intelligence...
...About sixweeks before the desert race, I was walking across the Stanford campus at about 10 P.M., and I had a brief vision of a very different kind of navigation...
...He also made the good prediction that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it did so a year earlier...
...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35...
...The principal organizer of the 1956 conference was an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth, John McCarthy, who was still in his twenties...
...It is crucial to understand that this is the foundation on which the whole notion of thinking machines was built...
...With a credulity that might have impressed African witch doctors, Joy declared that robotics, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering would gang up on us...
...He repeated what a colleague had once told him, that "critical change will occur when we reach the level at which computer programs can learn from the Internet...
...If one car had to be stopped for some reason, the car behind it would also be stopped...
...Skinner, who argued that language developed as a series of progressively elaborated grunts, each one rewarded in turn...
...In an article about the computerized defeat of the world chess champion, for example, the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: It seems to me obvious that machines will achieve consciousness...
...Arthur Clarke, whose science fiction was the basis of Kubrick's movie, still believes that AI will reach human levels, but in an interview published in 1999, he postponed that development until "after 2020...
...As it happened the creature crossed exactly between me and one of the lights...
...Minsky warned those going into AI: "If you see a student who says I'm building another robot, tell him 40 thousand people are doing that...
...I have to say that I was over-optimistic," he said, thinking back to the early days...
...Evidently he had become interested in the same natural-resource and energy issues that came to preoccupy the economist Julian Simon, who famously bet the professional alarmist Paul Ehrlich that the price of commodities would fall in the 1980s...
...That was the opinion of Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron...
...In 2000, Bill Joy, the former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, adopted Kurzweil's message but with a pessimistic spin...
...A ckitic on the web wrote that, as of 1994: "Lenat has revised his estimate of the total number of 'rules' required upward by a factor of ten (to 20-40 million), and extended the time needed by another ten years...
...It has seven members...
...A robot can "compute" its new location when it moves, but if there is any slippage or wheel spinning, then a discrepancywill open up between its real and its calculated position...
...Because every query ("Was Moses famous...
...That is the basis for the faith in cognitive AI...
...Death, in turn, is a subset of the frame "Event," which has as one of its properties TemporalExtent (indefinite in the case of death...
...McCarthy said he knew one or two computer scientists who were not materialists-he mentioned one who was a bishop in the Mormon Church-but they are the exception...
...In the view of JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 33 THE SEARCH FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE some of the younger researchers, however, this theoretical preparation has gone on for long enough, with little success...
...But were they...
...It is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil," he wrote...
...Even small children know millions of things, and they learn them in the first two or three years of life without having to be taught or realizing that they are learning anything...
...Or you could say, when a computer program can learn physics by reading a physics textbook...
...The field of artificial intelligence has been largely created and colonized by mathematicians, and it's worth noting in passing that the world of mathematics is itself an ideal world...
...His argument was opposed to that of the behaviorist B.F...
...It is generally accepted that he was also the first to use the term artificial intelligence, which today goes by the acronym AI...
...No obvious quantitative measure explained it...
...He imagines that there is a Moore's Law of artificial intelligence...
...There are a whole lot of things you know about string...
...The idea is to represent these in formal logic as opposed to English sentences...
...O~e MIT student recalled that "people were very rude to Chomsky when he came over to the AI lab...
...He still believes what he wrote in Commentary five years ago: "Chances are that, fifty years from now, we will be grateful to computer technology for showing us what marvelously powerful machines we can buildand how little they mean after all...
...But the latter's website had been a disappointment...
...With heavy reliance on Moore's Law--according to which computing power doubles every 18 months--Kurzweil promoted the same idea in his more recent book The Singularity Is Near...
...Often his ideas seem only tangentially related to AI...
...I couldn't resist asking McCarthy about the fox I had seen darting across the Stanford campus by night...
...Brooks told an interviewer in 1997: What we've been able to do is build robots that operate in the world, in unstructured environments, and do pretty well, because they use whatever structure there is in the world to get the tasks done...
...In the health-care department, expert systems can diagnose diseases from a list of symptoms (as indeed a medical encyclopedia can...
...Why so...
...Yet he is surely correct that if computers are to know how to perceive threedimensional objects, recognize them, decide whether to ignore them or to pay close attention, and so on, we must first form theories as to how human beings solve such problems...
...Robots can't do that...
...But he was open to the possibility that the actions of a designer, or "intervenor" as he put it, could be investigated using the methods of science...
...I think we'll be able to make a computer that looks as if it were understanding, that fakes it very well," he told the New York Times in 1994...
...When we do one thing in the real world, most other things in our environment do not change...
...I N THE PAST HALF CENTURY, an important distinction has emerged: between "strong" and "weak'AI...
...I was curious to know whether Gelernter was a materialist, too, so I asked him...
...Fifty years after the Dartmouth conference, the computer science people are still working on these problems...
...Decked out with radar, stereo, and monocular cameras, an array of five lasers, GPS, various sensors, and the latest in hi-tech from Silicon Valley, the vehicle completed the 130-mile course at an average speed of 19 mph and won the $2 million prize...
...What was that...
...Yet, in an exaggeration that has long characterized reporting on the subject, Life magazine in 1970 called Shakey "the first electronic person," capable of traveling about the moon "for months at a time, without a single beep of direction from the earth...
...Well, maybe some smart graduate student has thought of the new concepts but hasn't told us yet, and it will be five years...
...Then they programmed into Cyc the basic concepts inherent in each sentence, so that the program could "understand" their meanings...
...I told him I wanted to discuss AI, 50 years on...
...Understandably, she has been placed on a pedestal by feminists...
...They didn't want the rear car to see another one unexpectedly in front of it...
...Douglas Lenat, who has also been funded by the U.S...
...To illustrate the problem of building common sense into computers, one program decided that everyone who ever lived in the past was famous...
...An IBM program beat the world chess champion...
...A professor who deduces "don't commit murder" from abstract principles understands that someone else might deduce some other rule...
...Gelernter's e-mailed responses seemed to reinforce the idea of a growing gulf between cognitive and applied AI...
...It is assumed that a physical description of brain states can also yield a complete account of mental states...
...It arises because if an intelligent program is to work, it must be able to infer that a certain sequence of actions will achieve its goal...
...In a talk Minsky gave a few years ago, "It's 2001: Where's HAL...
...Well, it has had many quadrillions of trials, over many millions of years," he said...
...The first two sentences took Lenat's team three months to code...
...Now that they sit docilely under our desks we no longer expect that they possess, or will develop, minds of their own...
...McCarthy himself is a materialist and an atheist, but he has started an organization called Atheists for School Prayer...
...It distinguishes between computers on the one hand actually knowing and thinking--the still unattained goal of"strong" AI...
...There was no moon...
...A cartoon balloon pops up above that mass of individually unconscious neurons and says, "I exist...
...Ada died at the age of 36, the same age that her father died...
...Computer programs must know how to deduce the consequences of various actions...
...Helena...
...That might be ascertainable, too, he thought, because the past is turning out to be less impenetrable than we imagined...
...An attempt would be made "to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves...
...He added this about the science: What happens in physical robotics is you never get to do the same thing twice...
...I DECIDED TO FIND OUT what David Gelernter thought about these matters...
Vol. 39 • July 2006 • No. 6
