So far, in making my case that AI is (a) possible and (b) likely in the next decade or two, I’ve focused on techniques which are or easily could be part of a generally intelligent system, and which will clearly be enhanced by the two orders of magnitude increase in processing power we expect from… Continue reading Analogical Quadrature
AI researchers in the 80s ran into a problem: the more their systems knew, the slower they ran. Whereas we know that people who learn more tend to get faster (and better in other ways) at whatever it is they’re doing. The solution, of course, is: Duh. the brain doesn’t work like a von Neumann… Continue reading Associative memories
So we will take it as given, or at least observed in some cases and reasonably likely in general, that AI can, at the current state of the programming art, handle any particular well-specified task, given enough (human) programming effort aimed at that one task. We can be a bit more specific about what “well-specified”… Continue reading Learning and search
At the Foresight congerence special-interest lunch on IQ tests for AI, Monica Anderson suggested a test involving separating text which had had spaces and punctuation removed, back into words. As a somewhat whimsical version of the test, I suggested the Sigil of Scoteia: In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the frontispiece of the novel… Continue reading The Sigil of Scoteia
In the terminology I introduced in Beyond AI, all the AI we have right now is distinctly hypohuman: The overall question we are considering, is AI possible, can be summed up essentially as “is diahuman AI possible?” The range of things humans can do, done as flexibly as humans can do them, and learned the… Continue reading AI: how close are we?
40s: Cybernetics, the notion the brain did logic in circuits, feedback 50s: the computer, stored programs, Logic Theorist 60s: LISP, semantic nets, GOFAI 70s: SHRDLU, AM 80s: AI winter, expert systems, neural nets 90s: robots, machine learning 00s: DARPA grand challenge level of competence The main point of this post is to answer any objections… Continue reading A brief history of AI
I’m about to start a series of posts on the topic of why I think AI is actually possible. I realize that most of the readers here don’t probably need too much convincing on that subject, but you’d be surprised how many very smart people, many of them professors of computer science, are skeptical to… Continue reading Is AI really possible?
Today is the last day of the free webcast of the 2010 Foresight Conference being held now in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video may be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting (feel free to assist with this goal!). You can also follow the conference on… Continue reading Last day of free webcast of Foresight Conference on nanotech & AI
The other day I got a worried call from my mother-in-law. My wife usually calls her during her commute but that day she neither called or answered her phone. Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot. The amusing, if you can call it… Continue reading Civilization, B.S.O.D.
Shane Legg seems to think so: Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING. Having dealt with computation, now we get to the algorithm side of things. One of the big things influencing me this year has been learning about how much we understand about how the brain works, in particular, how much we know that should be… Continue reading Is the brain a reasonable AGI design?
