AI Going Nowhere?

jhigh writes "Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labratories is displeased with the progress in the development of autonomous intelligent machines. I found this quote more than a little amusing: '"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots," said Minsky. "Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking."'"

What use is AI without an operating platform

[Ruzty (46204)]

He has a complete disregard for the question of where the AI engine will run. If an AI is to be of any more use than a curiousity then those "little autonomous robots" must function in a viable manner so that the AI has something to do when it comes to "life".

I understand his frustration in general progress. But, those grad students are building a strong foundation for their later work that may very well meet the goals he is espousing. No need to have design flaws in implementation down the road because the engineer wasn't properly educated in physical design as well as logical design.

-Rusty

Thats a load of rubbish

[by Anonymous Coward]

Come off it, stop making escuses. Robitics and AI are two entirely different branchs. AI is almost pure math and computing, and robotics is an engineering discipline. Why are AI researching building little robots?

Building any form of AI system is not easy, but copping out of it by building toys is not the answer. We already have platforms for AI; they're called line terminals. Things like pattern matching do not require a fully autonomous robot, after all.

Minsky is right; whats new to come out of actual AI research in the last 30 years?

Re:Thats a load of rubbish

[Des Herriott (6508)]

"True AI" might require the sort of interaction with the environment that we're used to through our own senses, in which case building a robotic shell for an artificially intelligent entity could be a necessity.

If a human (or any animal) were left to grow with no senses and no method of communication (or the most very basic input/output, analogous to your line terminal), what sort of intelligence would develop? Probably nothing very coherent.

BTW, AI is most certainly not pure math.

MOD PARENT UP

[CompVisGuy (587118)]

Please mod the parent up.

I am an AI researcher and the parent poster is speaking truthfully.

The main challenges in AI at the moment do not concern building the physical robots -- e.g. a piece of kit on wheels with IR sensors or such things.

The main challenges in AI concern applying some very complicated math to solve problems like pattern recognition, density estimation and other forms of machine learning.

It seems to me that a large number of AI PhD students spend their lives tinkering with the mechanics and electronics of the robots that will ultimately be used to test their algorithms. This is wasted time; a good electronics graduate should be able to do the tinkering, it shouldn't require a prospective AI PhD student to do it.

I can see the point in the PhD student learning a little about the hardware that they want to run their algorithms on (so that they know the limitations and common problems with real hardware), but they should not spend all their time doing that and wasting the opportunity to spend their time contributing to their field (i.e. AI, not mechanics or electronics).

That said, many AI labs do not have the funding to be able to pay full time hardware technicians, so in many cases the PhD student *has* to do the tinkering :-(

Re:What use is AI without an operating platform

[moonbender (547943)]

I think the point is that the engineering problems have all been solved by someone already - or, at least, that there has been some progress towards solving them, while the AI science has (allegedly) been in a stall for some time. So the students are working their asses off solving problems that have already been solved, time which would better be used in solving problems to which no one has an answer yet.

Re:What use is AI without an operating platform

[PhilHibbs (4537)]

What they need, then, is for an engineering student to do their masters dissertation on creating a generic physical framework for AI systems, or a computing student to do theirs on a generic simulation environment for virtual AI 'bots. Then this can be re-used by AI students in subsequent years. Alternatively, each year they could team up engineering students working on the physical robots with computing studetns working on the AI systems, that way both departments are working on their core speciality.

About Minsky...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the man is quite brilliant, and possibly the most important voice in the field. That being said, he's also a self-important jerk. Intelligent Systems (what people in the field call AI) aren't where *he* thinks they should be, and he regularly complains about it.

Re:About Minsky...

[pz (113803)]

Try and name an AI researcher who is not a self-important jerk...

Oh, say, Rod Brooks, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Hal Abelson, Gerry Sussman, Eric Grimson, Pat Winston, Tom Knight ... all at MIT/AI ... need I continue?

The difference between Minsky and the rest is precisely as the first poster asserted. Having read Minsky's books, known him professionally and personally, and having taken his course, I must agree that the amount of weight placed on his words are not equal to their value. As others have observed (I forget whom and where), Minksy's original contributions were interesting ramblings at the edge of a new field which happened to pinpoint rich veins of research in some cases, and kill off valuable paths in others (think perceptrons which are, yes, in fact, very useful things, and yes, in fact, do model real neurons reasonably well, and no are not computationally impoverished unless you abide by Minsky and Papert's artifice of only single layers). In otherwords, in some cases, he got lucky, in others he fell flat. This initial success led him to continue pontification (think "Society of Mind", a book of little real contribution), while doing marginally small amounts of actual research. Rod Brooks, in contrast, has made far more, and far deeper, contributions working on his subsumption architecture.

Minsky's course (at the advanced graduate level) consists of students listening to his musings and ramblings which he often repeats through the term, since he has no syllabus, no agenda, and no apparent desire to teach. When he gives talks, they are all extemporaneous; someone like Churchill could pull that off, Minksy's stream-of-consciousness style keeps his acolytes happy, but leaves those with real thirst for knowledge quite parched. Does this not fit the accusation?

So what if Minksy thinks graduate students shouldn't be soldering robots? Does that matter? So what if the current AI field isn't following his pet projects, is he making any contributions himself? We've made tremendous strides in AI over the past decade; they just haven't been where Minksy thinks they should be, despite his questionable over-all track record. Exactly why should anyone care that much?

Why do you say AI is going nowhere?

[SpanishInquisition (127269)]

Does it bothers you that AI is going nowhere?

of course it's going no where...

[gricholson75 (563000)]

.. it was a really bad movie.

That's OK...

[by Anonymous Coward]

I don't see NON-ARTIFICIAL intelligence progressing a whole hell of a lot either...

Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?

[jdoeii (468503)]

It's not the AI which is going nowhere. It's the traditional approaches to AI such as Minsky's symbolic logic which are not going anywhere. Seach google for Henry Markram, Maass, Tsodyks. Their research seems very promising.

Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?

[sohp (22984)]

So true. Minsky's Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) has been a dead field since the 70s, after they figured out that getting a computer that could move blocks around in an idealized simple world was not a small first step, and Eliza showed them how easy it was to conflate intelligent with clever. The "successes" they had towards AI were, as one author has written, like climbing to the top of a tall tree and claiming you've made progress getting to the moon.

Now Minksy, never wanting to admit his life's work has been a dead end, comes out saying that it's all these other researchers working in other directions that are at fault for there being no progress. I imagine he believes that if only they'd all climb the tree with him, the trip to the moon could really start.

Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?

[bigjocker (113512)]

It's not a dead end. He is complaining that there seems to be no interest in studying the big picture. We are focusing in solving specific problems and creating "smart" systems that operate on a set of rules, maybe "learning" on the way to enhance the predefined rules originally installed by the creators.

But the real AI comes when you create a 'stupid' system that is able to become smart through learning and training. He feels dissapointed because nobody (or almost nobody) is focusing in this direction.

You have smart toys ala Aibo, and smart systems ala Eliza, and a lot of people is working towards creating smarter toys and smarter systems, but the real breaktrough will come when somebody manages to create the dumbest system possible.

Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?

[Lemmy Caution (8378)]

I see Minksy's lament as sideways admission of the correctness of the west-coast, connectionist paradigm. It's a shame that he is still sabotaging useful lines of research at MIT: investigating robotics is built around the insight that our own "ontological engines" are themselves derived from our sensorimotor systems.

Two unknowns dont make stuff work

[Neuronerd (594981)]

I very much enjoy the works of Markram and Tsodyks. What they mainly analyze is how two nerve cells can interact with each other. They showed how they change their connection weights and how the timing of spikes, nerve impulses, affect how neurons connect to each other and how they transmit information.

While these studies tell us a lot about the underlying biology they do not tell us what these modes of information transmission are used for. For years it had been known that synapses have complex nonlinear properties. Biology pretty much does not constrain what functions neurons compute.

Thats why I do not believe that such studies will bring us nearer to real AI anytime soon. The algorithms coming from these systems are severely underconstrained. A lot of modelling has followed the pioneering works of Markram and Tsodyks, one of them being Maas. All these algorithms are very fascinating and might yield insight into the functioning of the nervous system.

The algorithms however are lightyears from being applicable to real world problems. The field of AI is old and in some sense quite mature. None of the "biologically inspired" algorithms today can compete with state of the art machine learning techniques.

Intelligence isnt the problem

[Ogrez (546269)]

Humans measure intelligence by gauging replys to questions that have quantified answers. Giving an advanced computer a IQ test is sinply a matter of recalling the appropriate information from memory to answer. The true form of AI isnt about intelligence, its about reason. But how do you teach a computer to respond with an answer to a question that the computer has never encountered before... When we build a machine that can answer a question based on incomplete imput we will have made the first step in creating a machine that can "think"

reply to [e-mail]

Re:Intelligence isnt the problem

[Ogrez (546269)]

Actually upon rethinking... screw thinking.. I want a machine that has emotion...I want a machine that gets pissed off and tries to electrocute Garry Kasparov after loosing a chess game.

Biology First

[SuperMario666 (588666)]

How about we more thoroughly study and understand how human intelligence operates before we even presume to design something that imitates or rivals it in depth and complexity.

Re:Biology First

[tedrlord (95173)]

How about we do both? It's not like we have to choose one or the other. Advances are being made in both areas.

And artificial intelligence doesn't necessarily have to reflect human intelligence.

disappointing

[Gingko (195226)]

"As soon as we solve a problem," said Pollack, "instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system."

This is the most interesting comment to me. Because we understand the nature of the process that produces supposedly 'intelligent' results, (and we don't understand the same process in ourselves), we perhaps rightly just view the resulting system as just an application.

Seems like Minsky is throwing all his toys out of the pram because he doesn't want to admit to what everyone else has been saying for a while: that whether a computer can think is at best an astonishingly difficult question to answer and at worst meaningless. I'm a grad student who's just spent a year looking at computational linguistics and semantics (amongst other things), and the most debilitating restriction on the semantic side of things is the problem of so-called 'AI-completeness', which essentially says that if you solve this problem you have a, externally at least, thinking computer. Really simple things like anaphora resolution are AI-complete in the general case. If we could have solved this problem by now, I think it's fair to say we would have done, given its massive importance. However, we know that the brute-force case is ridiculously intractable, and we can't figure out how to do it any more cleverly. Roger Penrose argues that this is due to the fundemental Turing-style restrictions that we place on our notion of computing. Until we get a paradigm shift at that level, we're likely never to solve the general case.

And I'm sure that Minsky is aware that attempts to solve constrained domain inference and understanding have been taking place for a good long time now. I just don't see why he's so upset that the field of 'AI' (which is a nebulous catch-all term at best) has shifted its focus to things that we stand a cat in hell's chance of solving, and that have important theoretical and practical applications (viz. machine learning). Replicating human thought is not the be-all and end-all, and you can argue that it's not even that useful a problem.

Robots, though, I agree with. Can't stand the critters ;)

Henry

The Cyc project

[pauljlucas (529435)]

Although mentioned in a (lone) paragraph in the article, I don't know why we haven't heard more about the Cyc [cyc.com] project. Lenat's premise that you can't have intelligence without knowing the millions of "obvious" things about the world, aka, "common sense" seems intuitively right.

Shocking, indeed!

[Otter (3800)]

Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking.

What? Grad students are doing tedious, repetitive, mindless labor instead of making glamorous, thrilling, world-changing breakthoughs? This is an outrage!

Thank heaven I have a Ph.D. and got to spend this morning in the thrilling activity of drawing blood from 30 angry mice. I'm hoping to have the urine smell washed off before lunch.

But Robotics Must Precede AI

[CowboyRobot (671517)]

Ask some 3-year-old kids which way is up, and they will all know, but they won't be able to define it. Yet, since computers don't have bodies, they don't have anything like the semicircular canals that we have, which act as gyroscopes and give us an intuitive, non-intellectual sense of which way is up.
Trying to program intelligence purely with software puts the researcher at a disadvantage, since even the most fundamental rules and attributes of things (fire is hot, water is wet) have to be explicitly entered as constant variables.
Once robotics advances to the point where mobility, vision, and speech recognition can be taken for granted, then AI can be programmed as an add-on.
Body first, mind second - That's how animals evolved on this planet, and it's how, I believe, Rodney Brooks approaches this field.

Pot, meet Kettle

[ArghBlarg (79067)]

"Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking."

Yeah, much more shocking than the -- decades -- he (and others in the 'hard AI' camp) have been spending? They've made oh-so-much more progress, haven't they?

Rodney Brookes made more progress with his robots in the early nineties than the whole hard AI camp did in 3 decades. I remember seeing a documentary once comparing this huge robot which used a traditional procedural program to navigate through a boulder-strewn field. It took about 3 HOURS to decide where to put its foot next. Meanwhile, little subsumption architecture-based robots were crawling around like ants, in real-time. (Oh, and some of them had to learn to walk from first principles every time they were turned on -- only took about half an hour!) That's the most damning evidence of the failure of hard AI I can think of.

As others here have said, what good is a brain until we get a useful BODY working? Manueverability and acute senses are a must before an artificial intelligence can do anything useful, or learn from its environment effectively.

Minsky only has himself to blame.

[Wellspring (111524)]

If Marvin wants to know why AI hasn't made major strides in the past 30 years (and, by the way, I would say that it has) he should look no further than his own bullying, arrogant approach.

Promising subfields like perceptrons were intentionally quashed by him... he went out of his way to strangle investment and research in areas he considered to be a dead end. We're not literature majors: we can't just all say the same thing in a party over wine and cheese and call it progress.

Even bad ideas, when well explored, can give new meaning and better approaches to a field. And since this is research, noone knows the correct answer: even a dumb-seeming idea may turn out to be the right one-- or give us clues about features the right answer needs to have.

Of course we've had major advances in AI. One of the challenges of AI, as the article points out, is that once something is well understood, it is defined as being outside the AI field. Computer vision, face recognition, voice and speech recognition. Conversation engines like SmarterChild. No, this isn't HAL, but they are good, positive steps in the right direction.

Old guard moving out

[CmdrSanity (531251)]

I took Minsky's class last year, and let me tell you, the article couldn't print 75% of the irate stuff he has to say about AI, MIT, and life in general. We once spent an hour class session listening to Misky rant about modern science fiction and random things he didn't like about his Powerbook. In fact, most of his classes were extended rants about something or other (you zealots will be happy to know that he too, hates the Microsoft).

He comes across as affable but bitter. I found it strange that though he cointually complains about the leadership of the AI lab, he and his protege Winston were in control of it for some ~30 years without making any groundbreaking progress. In fact, Minsky's latest work "The Emotion Engine" is simply a retread of his decades-old "Society of Mind." I suspect that now that Brooks and the new guard are moving in, the old guard is looking for someone blame its lack of results on.

Minsky + Brooks

[Bob Hearn (61879)]

Here's some perspective from an MIT AI lab grad student who's been inspired by both Minsky and Brooks. (Minsky is on my Ph.D. committee.)

"AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s."

I agree, unfortunately. At least, what was traditionally meant by "AI" has been brain-dead. There is very little focus in the field today on human-like intelligence per se. There is a lot of great work being done that has immediate, practcal uses. But whether much of it is helping us toward the original long-term goal is more questionable. Most researchers long ago simply decided that "real AI" was too hard, and started doing work they could get funded. I would say that "AI" has been effectively redefined over the past 20 years.

"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots."

Minsky's attitude towards the direction the MIT AI lab has taken (Rod Brooks's robots) is well-known. And I agree that spending years soldering robots together can certainly take time away from AI research. But personally, I find a lot of great ideas in Rod's work, and I've used these ideas as well as Marvin's in my own work. Most importantly, unlike most of the rest of the AI world, Rod *is*, in the long run, shooting toward human-level AI.

Curiously, just last month I gave a talk at MIT, tited "Putting Minsky and Brooks Together". (Rod attended, but unfortunately Marvin couldn't make it.) The talk slides are at

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/dangerous.pdf [mit.edu].

In particular, I shoot down some common misperceptions about Minsky, including that he is focused solely on logical, symbolic AI. Anyone who has read "The Society of Mind" will realize what great strides Minsky-style AI has made since the early days. I also show what seem like some surprising connections to Brooks's work.

- Bob Hearn

Minsky is dangerous

[Helpadingoatemybaby (629248)]

Marvin Minsky has done more damage to progress in AI over the last few decades than any other person.

Before you yell flamebait or troll, let me explain.

I have been following the progress of various AI technologies, including neural nets and adaptive logic networks, for many many years now. Years ago perceptions were first developed and it was shown that they could learn simple patterns. Perceptrons were basically two layers of software simulated neurons. They worked, and researchers were fascinated and worked on them regularly.

Minsky, being the "highly regarded" and "leader" in AI, wrote a paper that proved that these perceptrons could never learn more complicated patterns, and threw a bunch of math at the reader. So people stopped. After all, there was a mathematical proof that perceptrons weren't going anywhere. Research skidded to a halt for decades because of Minsky.

Of course, then someone developed the (gasp!) THREE layer perceptron/neural net and sure enough with the right formula it could learn much more complicated tasks.

Minsky, in my opinion, does this regularly. The problem is, that he has a reputation in the industry as being a leader (I'm not sure why).

He's already lost us two or three decades of research because of his "leadership" -- I am terrified that he might cost us more development into the future.

Where could we have been if Minsky wasn't always going around half cocked, screaming that he is right? "Robots are useless!" is history repeating itself and him trying to get more press. Keep developing guys, just ignore the peanut gallery. There's always someone who says it can't work (ahem, Minsky) -- it can and it will.

Critical?

[nuggz (69912)]

So Minsky has an opinion, he expresses it, he provides data, calculations and evidence to support it.

People just accept it, and progress is delayed.

Why is it his fault that there are so many followers? If anything is to be blamed is that these researchers just blindly follow whatever he's saying rather then take a good critical look at what is going on.

If his math and theory "proved" that an area of AI was a dead end, and it wasn't, his math/theory was wrong. It is a sad state when nobody dare challenge the status quo.

Missing Minskey Quote

[Snot Locker (252477)]

They forgot to add this quote from Minskey:

"How the hell am I ever going to be able to download my brain into these damn little robots if they don't hurry up and make them smarter? I running out of time, dammit!!!"

Don't build robots, simulate them

[Ella the Cat (133841)]

Human Level AI's Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games, John E Laird and Michael van Lent American Association for Artificial Intelligence AI Magazine Summer 2001 pp 15-25

My summary of the above - the AI in games might not be too hot (some would dispute with the academics about that but let it go), but game environments themselves are complex enough to pose a challenge for state-of-the-art AI researchers.

I went to a "BOOM" conference at Cornell...

[5n3ak3rp1mp (305814)]

(Bits On Our Mind, an exhibition of some undergrad and graduate computer science work) ...and I headed STRAIGHT for the nematode booth. You see, I had heard that some clever Cornellian had created a simulation of the entire neural network of a nematode. The way I saw it, there was nothing else there that could possibly be more interesting than that.

So I found myself standing in front of a computer screen. It was a worm swimming through water! In 3D! In real time! After I pushed my jaw shut, I began to ask the genius student some questions...

"Is that real-time?" "Well, actually, no, that is a 10 second looping clip that took a week to calculate."

"Well, I see a neural map there. Is that complete?" "Well, actually, no, that is a simplified version of the real nematode nervous system, on the order of about 1 simulated neuron to 10 actual neurons."

"So you simulate neurons! That's awesome. Let's see the code." (He proceeds to flip through 4-5 pages of very sophisticated-looking mathematical equations to describe the behavior of ONE neuron.)

What a let-down! No wonder Minsky is pissed, real AI is HARD! :P

Software is behind, not hardware

[YllabianBitPipe (647462)]

We will soon have hardware that has the number of connections or processing power of a human brain. The problem is nobody's come up with the software to run on it. In humans this is what makes the brain more than big organ ... the "soul" if you are religiously inclined. Maybe a human soul can be reduced to nothing more than a program with an enourmous propesity to learn and adapt over years of training / habituation ... say from the years 0 to 18.

AI winter II ?

[alispguru (72689)]

What Minsky is actually flaming about here is the damage done to the field by the original "AI winter" and the real possibility of a new AI winter starting in a few years.

"AI winter" [216.239.51.104] is the name given to the collapse of strong AI as a business model in the mid 80's - expert systems and symbolic AI in general didn't deliver on their promises, and so the money went away. As a guy who got his doctorate in AI in 1985, I can tell you all about it. ;-)

One of the major causes of AI winter was researcher hubris - lots of people hacked up systems that appeared to solve 80 percent of certain complex problems and then said "all that stands between us and a complete solution is money and time". For many of those systems, solving the last 20 percent would have taken 2000 percent of the time, if it could have been done at all. The tragedy of AI winter, though, is that basically all of symbolic AI was abandoned, though some of it is creeping back out into the light with obfuscated syntax (see my .sig below).

What Minsky sees here is a lot of people heading down the same path, but with neural nets and small robots instead of expert systems. The new systems are doing some interesting things relative to the old symbolic AI systems (though they do have the advantage of 20 years of Moore's law to help them). But, will they scale up? Right now, nobody knows. If they don't, the last thing the field needs is another cycle of overpromise/underdeliver/abandon.

Maybe AI is just plain hard, and cracking it will take longer than one or two computer industry business cycles.

i thought it was about al gore

[circletimessquare (444983)]

"Al Going Nowhere?"

well duh!

what idiot made the lowercase L and uppercase I look the same?

but, since we're on the subject, did you know Al Gore invented the field of AI?

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Well...

One could argue that our brains are just synapses firing. Each one on it's own knows absolutely nothing. However, it's the SYNERGISTIC effects of all the synapses working together that creates our brain, which allows us to reason, etc (Note: This is without religion getting in the way, I'd personally not go there...)

Steve

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[Surak (18578)]

The problem with that is that no one really *knows* how the brain works beyond a very, very basic and limited understanding. No one has ever been able to satisfactorily create/reproduce one. There's more going on than just synapses in there, that much most scientists can agree on. What they don't agree on is *what* else is going on in there.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[Transient0 (175617)]

No one has ever been able to satisfactorily create/reproduce one.

My parents had no problem producing a brain; four in fact. Maybe I'll create some myself some day. I could tell you how but I'd need a signed note from your mom :).

Creating brains isn't hard; creating artificial brains is.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[tsa (15680)]

I read about artificial brains in a book somewhere. To be able to make an artificial brain we first need to know how to make a lot of positrons, and how to keep those away from electrons. Then we can make a brain.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[jdoeii (468503)]

> You'll never have real, true intelligence

Define "real, true intelligence" :-)

> You can try to simulate that, but so far
> simulation consists of what amounts to a
> gazillion 'if' tests

That's what tradiditonal AI school is doing. Yes, you are correct. It won't go anywhere. On the other hand spiking neural networks are very promising. Search google for "liquid state machine". These researches are making progress novadays, not Minsky.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[Hatta (162192)]

Neither do neurons "know anything".* They are just little machines that do one thing, fire when they reach -70mv. It is the higher order structure that is important. It is the interconnected hierarchies and strange loops that create intelligence. We're just so punch drunk with technology though, that we try and brute force a problem which is really best solved with imprecision, heuristics and guessing. But I think it's an important stage to go through while we refine our ideas of what intelligence really is. I'm still waiting for a good definition of "concept" and "idea" If you're interested I'd highly recommend the book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which is a collection of papers and essays from Douglas Hofstadters group. He has a great essay in there concerning just this problem.

* One might claim LTP or LTD as some sort of neuronal knowledge. Ok, that's fair, but my point stands if you apply it to the building blocks of neurons. Do ion channels "know"? Do amino acids? It's turtles all the way down.

Sour Grapes

[JonTurner (178845)]

That's all there is to it. Minski is just sore that his theories from 30 years ago aren't proving themselves, and the decentralized models being implemented by his rivals at MIT (e.g. Rod Brooks and his graduate students) are demonstrating remarkably sophisticated behaviors and advancing the state of the art.

Re:Sour Grapes

[Catbeller (118204)]

Minsky isn't angry that his AI "theories" aren't panning out. He's angry that AI researchers aren't making an attempt to think upnew AI theories that aren't glorified vaccuum cleaners.

He's right. Theoretical work has ground to a halt in the U.S. Universities have succcumbed to business-oriented research to make money -- although, given all that cash, it's amazing that tuition keeps skyrocketing.

Government is now pretty much owned by corporate people, and they aren't metering out grant money to loing-haired theory about AI. Grant-driven University research is no pretty much a free source of corporate R&D.

Minsky's right: AI as science has died, not because it was impossible to improve the theories, but because it wasn't making any money.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Lumpy (12016)]

It can pick me out in a crowd, and it can show a number of emotions, such as surprise, anger, and boredom.... yawn.


to an extent yes it has decent pattern recognition. can it pick you out from the rear? no. side? no.

Can it simulate and fool you into thinking it is showing emotions ? yes. is it anytihng but an expensive toy? no.

the Abio is amazing, but it hardly does what people think it does. and that is the key with the abio.. it does alot of things that fool humans quite well.

it will get better, but it is hardly near AI material.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Mad Man (166674)]

It can pick me out in a crowd, and it can show a number of emotions, such as surprise, anger, and boredom.... yawn.

My dog can do the same thing.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Tim Macinta (1052)]

It was still pretty much explicitly programmed to do those things. It's not really bored, it was just programmed to act bored, etc. Even the image recognition is a testament to the intelligence of the programmers, but not really to the AIBO itself.

How do you distinguish between something that just acts bored and something with really is bored? An argument could be made that when a real dog seems bored it is merely acting that way because it is programmed (via its instincts) to act bored. How is that different from the AIBO, apart from the fact that some people know exactly how an AIBO works? A real dog is merely a chemical computer anyway, so in essence, the emotions that you perceive in it are programmed as well, we just don't have the documented source code to work with.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Quino (613400)]

You're making the same leap of faith that most people make (and I now think is incorrect): The human (or Dog) mind is a biological computer therefore an IBM with the right software is also a mind in the same sense.

It doesn't work this way, and yes, there is a difference. Having an outward appearance of intelligence is not enough to show intelligence. Read Searle and Block's discussions on the Chinese Room argument -- it's a fascinating and eye opening read (I think it was Block that -- quite convincingly, IMHO -- makes the case that most of our intelligence is innately biological, and "strong AI" not even possible with what we know today).

IMHO one of the problems with AI is that we don't even know what human intelligence is, and until there is a fundamental advance (not technological but in our understanding of our human/biological mind) then it seems to me the most we can hope for are machines that mindlessly ape intelligent behavior, but are not intelligent in any but very superficial ways or by very loose definitions.

Something that mimics the outward appearance of intelligence is a far cry from what, hopefully we'll be capable of in the (probably still distant?) future.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[trg83 (555416)]

This may get a little too philosophical, but I'm going to give it a try. What is the key difference between programming and parenting? You explicitly tell your child what they are and are not allowed to do (sometimes they malfunction/misbehave) and do it anyway. You tell them what emotions are appropriate at certain times. At grandma's funeral it is not appropriate to giggle and laugh. It is also not appropriate to look bored, as we are showing respect for the dead. After going through all the disallowed emotions, that leaves a solemn look and maybe some tears.

What about pattern recognition? How long do parents spend holding up pictures of various animals or various shapes for their children to identify?

When it gets right down to it, every one of us has been significantly programmed by our parents, teachers, and government. I am not arguing against the system, just saying that's how it is. I don't believe AI as anticipated will ever truly exist because the degree of creativity and imagination desired exists only in humans either because of an all-knowing, all-powerful creator or millions of years of mutations.

The 'A' stands for artificial!

[Thud457 (234763)]

"Sure, but the whole point of AI was that we were supposed to be able to ask it where it thought it was going... and that not only it would know, but would give a well thought out answer too!"

You can't get that much out of most humans!