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 about my AIBO?

[khalua]

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

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Lumpy]

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's the difference?

[Chris Burke]

What's the difference between thinking and fooling people into believing you're thinking?

The same difference between cheating on a test in a subject you've never taken and actually knowing the material: as soon as you're asked a question that isn't on your crib sheet, the charade is over.

An AIBO has a pre-programmed set of behaviors, and any stimulus it isn't programmed to respond to will not have a realistic effect. The same is true of Loebner Prize winner Alice -- the only difference is the size of the pre-programmed response database. Ask it something it's never heard, and it will choke.

When these AIs are able to produce convincing responses to new stimuli, then I'll say that the difference between "fooling" and actually thinking has become irrelevent.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[MCZapf]

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.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Tim Macinta]

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]

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]

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.

Re:What about my AIBO?

[Mad Man]

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.

Text of Article

[Anonymous Coward]

AI Founder Blasts Modern Research
By Mark Baard

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,58714, 00.html

02:00 AM May. 13, 2003 PT

Will we ever make machines that are as smart as ourselves?

"AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s," said AI guru Marvin Minsky in a recent speech at Boston University. Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959 with John McCarthy.

Such notions as "water is wet" and "fire is hot" have proved elusive quarry for AI researchers. Minsky accused researchers of giving up on the immense challenge of building a fully autonomous, thinking machine.

"The last 15 years have been a very exciting time for AI," said Stuart Russell, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-author of an AI textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Russell, who described Minsky's comments as "surprising and disappointing," said researchers who study learning, vision, robotics and reasoning have made tremendous progress.

AI systems today detect credit-card fraud by learning from earlier transactions. And computer engineers continue to refine speech recognition systems for PCs and face recognition systems for security applications.

"We're building systems that detect very subtle patterns in huge amounts of data," said Tom Mitchell, director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery at Carnegie Mellon University, and president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "The question is, what is the best research strategy to get (us) from where we are today to an integrated, autonomous intelligent agent?"

Unfortunately, the strategies most popular among AI researchers in the 1980s have come to a dead end, Minsky said. So-called "expert systems," which emulated human expertise within tightly defined subject areas like law and medicine, could match users' queries to relevant diagnoses, papers and abstracts, yet they could not learn concepts that most children know by the time they are 3 years old.

"For each different kind of problem," said Minsky, "the construction of expert systems had to start all over again, because they didn't accumulate common-sense knowledge."

Only one researcher has committed himself to the colossal task of building a comprehensive common-sense reasoning system, according to Minsky. Douglas Lenat, through his Cyc project, has directed the line-by-line entry of more than 1 million rules into a commonsense knowledge base.

"Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things, and that glasses of liquid should be carried right-side up," reads a blurb on the Cyc website. Cyc can use its vast knowledge base to match natural language queries. A request for "pictures of strong, adventurous people" can connect with a relevant image such as a man climbing a cliff.

Even as he acknowledged some progress in AI research, Minsky lamented the state of the lab he founded more than 40 years ago.

"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."

"Marvin may have been leveling his criticism at me," said Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, who acknowledged that much of the facility's research is robot-centered.

But Brooks, who invented the automatic vacuum cleaner Roomba, says some advancements in computer vision and other promising forms of machine intelligence are being driven by robotics. The MIT AI Lab, for example, is developing Cog.

Engineers hope the robot system can become self-aware as they teach it to sense its own physical actions and see a causal relationship. Cog may be able to "learn" how to do things.

Brooks pointed out that sensor technology has reached a point where it's more sophisticated and

Sour Grapes

[JonTurner]

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]

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.

Semi-artificial intelligence

[axxackall]

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.

The real money will begin to flow once the humankind will stop being scared of direct integrating of humans into computer networks.

I am not sure when, but ultimately all keyboards, mice and screens will take their places in musiums. People will communicate with computers and each other by connecting computers directly to their brain. Thus, the solid knowledge of natural i

What use is AI without an operating platform

[Ruzty]

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

[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]

"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]

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:MOD PARENT UP

[frank_adrian314159]

so in many cases the PhD student *has* to do the tinkering

In most cases, the hardware and its limitations can be simulated. The only reason that most robotic AI projects are embedded in hardware is because it makes good eye candy for the science press, funders, etc. If you have a good simulation of the environment and the platform, you no longer need to build the hardware for AI research to proceed.

Also, why does one need to build new platforms each time a project ensues? Many robotic components could be reused so that only processor boards, motive actuators, or sensors would need to be updated. The reuse of firmware would cut down on the amount of programming time, as well. I think a good MS thesis would be to develop a kind of common robotic architecture along with a simulation testbed. This would allow the AI researchers to get back to work and only do last minute tinkering.

Brilliant idea

[kiwimate]

In most cases, the hardware and its limitations can be simulated. The only reason that most robotic AI projects are embedded in hardware is because it makes good eye candy for the science press, funders, etc. If you have a good simulation of the environment and the platform, you no longer need to build the hardware for AI research to proceed.

Now that makes a great deal of sense. When I was at university, I did all of my VAX work through either a terminal session or, more commonly, an emulator. It would s

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[rickwood]

Just guessing here, but I believe the grandparent post was refering more to the work of people like Douglas Hofstader [indiana.edu] than work being done on artifical neural networks. I can highly recommend Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought [indiana.edu] as an introduction to this branch of AI research.

I get the impression though that many AI researchers see Hofstader as a heretic. That's too bad because I think the ideas he and his team have developed hold more promise than any other approach to AI currently extant.

Re:What use is AI without an operating platform

[moonbender]

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]

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...

[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]

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]

Does it bothers you that AI is going nowhere?

of course it's going no where...

[gricholson75]

.. it was a really bad movie.

That's OK...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?

[jdoeii]

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]

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]

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?

[rpk]

Yep, logic-based AI is definitely at a dead end. Minsky won't admit it. A lot of AI researchers at MIT went to the Media Lab when they saw the writing on the wall.

Robots are not a bad thing to work on if other kinds of AI are going to have a chance, because a more holistic kind of AI would recognize that intelligence and cognition first emerged as a function of having a physical body. On the other hand, it's just robotics, it's not AI itself.

Also, AI was good for the hackers who supported its development on computer workstations. Systems like the Lisp Machine still compare very well to current languages and tools.

Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?

[Lemmy Caution]

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]

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.

Grad students having fun

[dfn5]

Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart.

So hire and pay them money so they do real research instead of having fun. Otherwise quit your bitchin'. I personally think building stupid robots is cool.

Well...

[Dark Lord Seth]

"Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things, and that glasses of liquid should be carried right-side up," reads a blurb on the Cyc website. Cyc can use its vast knowledge base to match natural language queries. A request for "pictures of strong, adventurous people" can connect with a relevant image such as a man climbing a cliff.

I'd consider that pretty much intelligent, compared to some people I know. Then again, some people I know can hardly be described as sentient, let alone intelligent.

Intelligence isnt the problem

[Ogrez]

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]

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]

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]

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]

"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]

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.

Re:The Cyc project

[Alomex]

This reminds me of a quote from French mathematician Henry Poincare: "just as houses are made out of stones, so is science made out of facts; and just as a pile of stones is not a house, a collection of facts is not necessarily science."

Applied to the cyc project: a collection of facts is not necessarily intelligence.

Shocking, indeed!

[Otter]

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.

Re:Shocking, indeed!

[ahem]

"blood from 30 angry mice"

Now *that* is a great name for a band!

But Robotics Must Precede AI

[CowboyRobot]

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.

Re:But Robotics Must Precede AI

[vidarh]

The thing is robots can "easily" be simulated. There are lot of mechanical complexities that can be ignored if you simply let your AI's interact with a simulate environment instead of a real one.

"Body first, mind second" sounds nice, but without reproduction and a mechanism for evolution you're not doing anything but creating an environment for your AI to interact with - you're not creating the pressures that caused evolution of intelligence in nature. So why go through the trouble of mechanics when you c

What is the purpose of AI?

[duffbeer703]

We do not understand how to control (or if it is even ethical to control) the billions of automonous intelligent agents roaming this planet... so why should creating a whole new class of intelligent automata be a priority.

AI today has nothing to do with intelligence. Its all basically rule-based procedural programming. While this allows us to make some really neat applications like automatic vacuum cleaners and pool scrubbers, it has nothing to do with "intelligence".

The human mind is not rule-based -- we impose a framework of rules to allow everyone to live together in relative harmony. The core of our being -- how our mind actually works -- remains an absolute mystery.

Re:What is the purpose of AI?

[frank_adrian314159]

The human mind is not rule-based -- we impose a framework of rules to allow everyone to live together in relative harmony.

So, when you see a cliff, you blindly walk off it? After all, there are no rules disallowing it, and it's not clear that anyone else's "relative harmony" would be disturbed by such a thing.

Humans have many rules that they create and live by themselves - many having to do with self-preservation, self-actualization, and motivation - that have little to do with you simplistic explanation

Pot, meet Kettle

[ArghBlarg]

"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.

Great Minsky Quote

[dmorin]

Paraphrased, but the spirit is there: "And when a robot actually does succeed and walk down the hall and through the door, or whatever it's supposed to do, you've learned absolutely nothing because it may not do it again the next time. This is why mechanical engineers love their videos so much. With video they can say 'See, it really worked once!'"

Minsky only has himself to blame.

[Wellspring]

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.

Re:Minsky only has himself to blame.

[varjag]

Promising subfields like perceptrons were intentionally quashed by him...

His take at perceptrons was vaild and well-founded. They indeed suffered from linear separability problem.

Re:Minsky only has himself to blame.

[XSforMe]

The original poster probably meant neural networks more than perceptrons. By the time his paper was published (1969) neural networks were far more advanced than a simple perceptron, and had easily overcomed the linear separation problem. Some people claim he along with Papert engineered this paper to get a juicy DARPA grant that was just about to be assigned. His paper efectively killed research in this area for almost 20 years.

Minsky has always been a bit of a weasel and knows very well how to pull the st

Re:Minsky only has himself to blame.

[virtigex]

Speech recognition did not come out of AI initiatives. After expensive and fruitless attempts to apply AI techniques to speech recognition, researchers with statistical and signal processing backgrounds applied made substantial progress on speech recognition during the 1990's. The core search algorithm came from ones that modems use to extract digital signals from noisy signals.

The speech recognition community also investigated techniques using neural networks, although they did not produce a clear vin o

Old guard moving out

[CmdrSanity]

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]

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]

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]

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.

I wonder what...

[sielwolf]

Rodney Brooks (head of MIT's AI lab) has to say about this since he is the genesis of the "cheap, fast, and out of control" school of AI that Minsky is deriding here. But since rantage like this from Minsky isn't new, I bet Brooks takes it in stride.

About 20 years ago AI was going down the craperroo until folks like Brooks decided that the AI field would be better served by moving it from the more theoretical GOFAI method to a more applicable style. Revitalized everything.

Re:I wonder what...

[studboy]

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

Rodney Brooks (who's The Man) said something like "a [working] robot is worth a thousand papers." Instead of a top-down view, subsumption architechture robots have a tight connection to sensing and action, but often no memory. One such robot was able to search out, find and grab empty coke cans, then take them to the trash!

(semiquote from Steven Levy's "Artificial Li

Artificial Intelligence Is Magic

[Jerk City Troll]

People who do perform illusions and escape tricks have been doing things mostly the same way for decades. Magic tricks may change slightly, but all the basic principles and tricks are the same. There's no real evolution, just adaptation to please the crowd.

Now, with that in mind, let's look at artificial intelligence. AI has always been about trying to convince an audience that a machine is thinking. This is demonstrated by the very existence of the Turring test and many products (such as the Aibo, Furby, etc) that try to mimick emotions. If the audence is entertained, amused, or convinced, the AI is considered good. Bad AI is when the audience can see right through it.

Artificial intelligence is magic. It's a trick. It's an illusion.

It is no surprise then that AI hasn't really advanced. The trades of showmen are practically unchanged for hundreds of years. Razzle-dazzling an audience involves technological advances, but it remains unchanged. Even in the cases where "artificial intelligence" is used to aid in medical diagnosis ("expert systems") or manufacturing are really only following man-made logical structures. The computers aren't thinking, they're only doing what they're told to do, even if indirectly. The end result is impressed people who think the machine is smart.

Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. If you want to see how badly AI is going nowhere, I hightly recommend reading The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak [lutterworth.com]. While his focus is not on the fallicy of AI, it covers it in context with the much broader disillusionment of computers by society.

Now, what does AI need in order to progress? Probably AI creating other AI. Something with a deeper embodiment of evolution. As long as it's man-made, it will never be intelligent, just following a routine. Of course, I am going to stop right here... I am not qualified to offer a solution these obstacles.

Missing Minskey Quote

[Snot Locker]

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!!!"

Re:Missing Minskey Quote

[lute3]

Awesome. :)

By the by, here are a couple of articles that address and expound upon (with bigger 'public' names like Bill Joy) the progress of A.I.

May artificial intelligence remain artificial [asia1.com.sg]
A.I. Can't Yet Follow Film Script [wired.com]

The reason AI-ism

[tenzig_112]

It's simple hateful biggotry. Look at the way sentient machines are treated in the anti-AI media.

• Autonymous robots may appear benign, but it won't last past the second reel. Even Robbie went bad.
  
• Even when AI's are good for a lengthy period, this is only an attempt to make the audience sleepy in order to somehow forward their evil agenda.
  
• When the chips are down and a basic task is required, the AI breaks down and gets all huffy about it [see: "I can't do that, Dave."].
  
• When Terminator came back and was helpful, he was noted as "one of the good ones" a hallmark of a biggoted mindset.
  

People justify their robophobia by pointing to these fictional examples, but if recent murder statistics are to be believed, the score is a bit lopsided.

Humans: 1,453,242,122 Robots: 0

This kind of prejudicial attitude must end.

Smarter than Junk Mail Senders

[panda]

> Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things...

Hey, that thing is already smarter than the companies that continue to send junk mail to my grandfather who has been dead for 22 years, now. Maybe they should get that software to manage their mailing list?

Don't build robots, simulate them

[Ella the Cat]

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]

(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]

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.

Re:Software is behind, not hardware

[I_redwolf]

No machine, algorithim or other man made item has anything close to the processing power of a human brain, not now or into the forseeable future. The idea of AI has never been about software as the concept is quite simple even in practice. The issue has always been about hardware; the hardware gets faster but it's still no where near fast enough to compete with anything other than a small toddler; feed it too much information and it becomes slower, infact it starts to retard after a certain stage, which mak

Minsky is in his own little world

[elmegil]

If there were actually interesting work in AI that didn't involve soldering little robots together, there'd be people doing it. But there isn't, really, much that's generally appealing in the field at Minsky's level or using his approaches.

I suspect part of Minsky's problem is frustration that his ideas about AI aren't bearing fruit, so he's going to take it out on other people's different approaches. It's not much different from the Perceptrons paper he co-wrote in the late 60's that nearly killed Neural Network research for most of the next decade. Never mind that there was plenty of useful neural network research to be done that avoided the failings of the perceptron model.

In my opinion, if we had the wholistic understanding of intelligence that would let us use Minsky's type of approach to AI, there wouldn't be anything left to do but implementation! One cannot just a priori assume all principles of intelligence by self-examination, and that's where he fails. There are interesting things to learn in that approach, but a large number of them have already been learned, so people are turning to other means (bottom up approaches focussing on self organization are doing well and leading to new discoveries) to get a broader understanding of what is involved in intelligence.

Just because Minsky has sour grapes doesn't mean that the robot people aren't doing useful research.

AI winter II ?

[alispguru]

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]

"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?

Marvin Minsky is an idiot

[SlayerDave]

Let's not forget that Minsky (along with Papert) declared that single-layer perceptrons were basically useless and there was no reason to suspect that multilayer varieties would be any better. That little, wrong statement basically shut down all neural networks research for ~20 years. Research didn't recover until the mid 1980's with the discovery of the backpropagation algorithm, along with other neural architectures such as the Hopfield network, ART, and the self-organizing map. Advances in neural modeling have helped theoretical neuroscientists begin to understand the nature of neural processing in the brain, no thanks to Minsky.

Minksy belongs to the old school of AI thinking. These guys believe that it is possible to make statements about intelligence itself, without considering the interactions of the organism/agent with its environment or the underlying architecture of the brain/CPU. I think that the total failure of this style of thinking to produce anything interesting in 50 years proves that this approach is sterile. Minsky laments the fact that graduate students build robots, but this activity exposes students to the challenges of constructing a device that must actually interact with the environment. It is ridiculous to assume that you could design a system capable of intelligent behavior without ever confronting the problems of sensors and actuators. Almost every part of the brain is devoted to processing raw sensory input or generating motor output. One cannot simply design an intelligent system without worrying about sensory input and behavioral output. The CYC project of Lenat has the laudable goal of teaching a machine "common sense" by hard coding a vast database of simple statements like "Trees cannot walk". This is a totally wrongheaded approach to learning and reasoning, and is typical of old school, hard AI.

We will only make progress in engineering intelligent, adaptive systems by studying actual examples of intelligent, adaptive systems, namely animals. Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to embrace the tools of mathematical modeling and simulation wo help explain nervous system structure and function. Computer scientists would do well to similarly embrace the work of experimental neuroscience.

Minsky is a dinosaur.

outside the box and inside the box

[bigpat]

Seems like AI has progressed about as far as it can go inside the box, only machines that can proactively interact with an environment as people do will learn to think like people.

Imagine what kind of thing you would be without vision, touch, smell, hearing or the ability to move and change your environment. Without these forms of interaction where would human intelligence be?

Seems that a Budhist philosphical approach is most helpful here, ie we are our parts, not more and not less. We are what we are. If you wish to create something that is like a human, you should take an inventory of our parts figure out how they fit together and try to find analogous electronics, software and hardware.

Which is precisely what a lot of the robot folks have started doing. Except that most have started a bit smaller and have modeled insects instead. Finding that they can model seemingly complex insect behavior with simple algorithms and machines.

Although, perhaps the next best step isn't building real robots at all, which can be expensive, error prone and time consuming, but building virtual robots that can be placed in virtual environments of our invention, somewhat like a "Matrix" virtual reality with intelligent agents that can learn. This approach is more computer intensive, since the environment as well as the agent would require large amounts of computing resources, also, the agent would have to perceive the "environment"

Seems that many more forms of human nature could be investigated in this way.

George Heilmeier, Texas Instruments, and AI

[dprice]

From 1983 through 1991, George Heilmeier was the Chief Technical Officer at Texas Instruments. He pushed TI into massive investments in AI R&D. Some of the best technical people I knew at TI thought the AI stuff was a waste of time, but it was being pushed by Heilmeier and the executives. Marvin Minsky was one of the experts brought in as an AI consultant, and he appeared in various TI propaganda. At the time the Japanese were pushing "fifth generation computing" which included AI, so there was a push to compete with the Japanese. TI developed AI hardware and software and tried to force fit it into various applications. They claimed various successes applying AI to industry problems, but eventually is all collapsed into a big waste of time and money. Heilmeier left at the end of the collapse.

Today you can find Heilmeier all over the place on various corporate boards and winning various awards for technical excellence. It is interesting that in most of the the bios that you can find on the web about Heilmeier, you don't find references to how he lead TI down the AI path to a deadend.

Marvin Minsky has no clue

[porky_pig_jr]

Marvin Minsky considers intelligence is something like the set of absolute rules, which can be separated from both the subject posessing this feature ('intelligence') and the real world. The reality however is that intelligence is simply a tool for survival in a hostile environment, just another stage in evolutionary process. It has been evolved in specific circumstances, and will continue evolving. It *may* appear as the absolute set of rules (different religious believes is a good example), but this is appearance only. The bottom line is that you have to build the creature (robot or whatever) which interacts with other like creatures and the environment and try to adapt to both. Intelligence may appear as a by-product of this adaptation process. So -- building the robot with intelligence of worm is more productive than trying to simulate Einstein in some computer program. The AI as defined by Minsky and Co. is an emperor's new cloths. This is entirely *his* fault AI didn't go anywhere. The whole concept of separating the intelligence from the background it has evolved is wrong. Only someone who believes that 'mind', 'intelligence', etc is something which was given us by God ('mind' vs 'body') can continue insisting on this approach, but it is no longer a science if you wish, but religion or methaphysics.

Would a computer think that you are intelligent?

[jefeweiss]

It seems to me that the focus on robotics, and insisting computers become good at human thinking tasks is a limited view of what artificial intelligence could be.

If you were put inside a little white box where you had to flip millions of switches on and off according to certain simple rules, you would look like an idiot next to a computer. A computer can't walk around and recognize things, and doesn't know what an apple is, so what? In my opinion, machine intelligence should be focused on making computers able to make themselves better at what they do best. I'm not sure what a super intelligent computer system would be used for, and I don't think that I would even be able to imagine what would be possible. I would be interested to know what other people think about this idea. Most of the things that I can think of tie back into the "real" world somehow. What would a self-organizing non 3-dimension oriented intelligence be able to do?

Saying that AI is impossible because computers can't come into "our world" of three dimensions, or understand our literature is kind of intelligence chauvinism.

Maybe they'd have made more progress if...

[geekee]

Stallman and co. hadn't spent so much of their time rewriting unix *GNU), instead of working on AI, like they were supposed to be doing. :-)

Don't listen to 'ol Minsky

[jungd]

As an AI researcher and someone who's read Minsky's books and listened to him talk - I can say that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He was big in his time, but things have moved on and he hasn't. He is an old, pesimistic, armchair AI 'researcher' who still thinks AI is easy. He doesn't understand why AI needs to be embodied and situated.

Having said that, I do agree that AI is almost going nowhere (anyone can see that). But I don't believe Minsky understands why.

Those 'stupid little robots' are the best thing to happen to AI - unfortunately most AI 'researchers' don't really understand what they're doing. Consequently, 97% of the time and effort purported being spend on AI research, isn't.

With a few exceptions, the main reason for the 'advances' we're seeing in AI/robotics now, is that algorithms are riding the wave of advances in computing power.

My guess is that you'll see most of the advances in AI coming as more and more 'real scientists' from other disciplines - such as ethology, biology and neurology - get involved in it.

Keep in mind that this is my opinion - shared by an increasing number of people in the field, but still a small minority.

Classic Minsky vs. Brooks

[Ratbert42]

Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart.

This is a classic battle between Minsky and Brooks. Heck, we had the same battle in our labs (not MIT). I believe that the Brooks response is along the lines of "sure you'll take an extra year to graduate with me, but you'll have one hell of a demo tape." I agree with Brooks. I still show people videos of one of my robots years later. I've never shown anyone any of my simulated robot work afterwards.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[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]

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]

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]

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?

[frank_adrian314159]

My parents had no problem producing a brain; four in fact. Maybe I'll create some myself some day.

Nah... You read Slashdot!

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[snatchitup]

Plus, each synapse has actually mutated over time due to biological feedback (memory), also, they are analog. Each and every sinapse is an analog computer, not digital.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[Catbeller]

"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."

That's what Minsky is getting at. Few people are working on that problem.

Research talent in universities seem to be striving for business solutions. But IMO, such research should be primarily done by businesses, not AI labs. Universities should create new science.

Check out computational neurobiology

[ca1v1n]

Actually, they have made significant strides already in figuring out how the brain works. Check out the Levy Lab [virginia.edu] at the University of Virginia. They've trained a computer model of a rat's hippocampus to do all sorts of intelligent things, such as transitive inference, sequence completion/combination/disambiguatuion, goal finding, etc. While these are not difficult problems for humans to solve or hardcode into a program, the fact that a single network can do these different and sometimes contradictory things represents something that I would call intelligence. As far as I know, they don't plan on having a model of a human brain very soon, since U.Va. lacks NSA-scale compute servers, but even rat-level learning is pretty cool.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[jdoeii]

> 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?

[sohp]

Indeed, GOFAI and the computational model of human intelligence is where Minsky and his ilk have been stuck for decades. As many of the other replies in this topic show, the traditional idea that the brain is a sort of fleshy collection of logic gates is still the most common belief. There are many authors that have written and demonstrated that the brain probably doesn't function as a mass of context-free predicate logic rules -- including my favorite, Hubert Dreyfus. [berkeley.edu]

The progress of AI is uncertain, but

Not so sure

[varjag]

There are many authors that have written and demonstrated that the brain probably doesn't function as a mass of context-free predicate logic rules -- including my favorite, Hubert Dreyfus.

Dreyfus argument is old, and its rebuttals are well-known. Consider that symbolic systems are not limited to context-free predicate logic.

The progress of AI is uncertain, but it is certain that there's no future for symbolic logic AI.

It is not certain for me.

Both connectionist and symbolic approaches may succeed if given enough time. However, I think that obsession with neural nets of many people here is of the same nature that obsession of numerous early aviation enthusiasts with wind-flipping devices. Certainly you can mimic mechanics of nature with some effort, but there are usually better ways to do the job.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?

[NorthDude]

And what about you and me?
We act based on external stimuli and based on what we have learned as far as I know.

Unfortunately, we will never fully understand how we are "made" and how we "work".
And without being able to fully introspect ourselves, we will never be able to build a computer which works exactly like a human.
How could you possibly create something to be a replica of something you don't understand?
Cognitive science has made immense progress, but it is still all models and theory.
And as huma

Re:Hrmm

[kevin42]

No!

It drives me crazy that people are so concerned about possible technologies, that they want to "slow down and think about the consequences of xxx".

This is really just unfounded fear. While we still don't know if something is possible, is not the time to worry about what problems we can concieve that it will bring. Knowledge is more important than worrying about some issues that may or may not arise if we are able to do something. It is good to ask "If we cause this atom to split, will it kill us?", but

Don't turn slaves into humans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of it. Only a stupid robot is a good robot.

Re:AI is going wherever it wants

[yintercept]

Perhaps our greatest error is thinking that AI want's to be found. Imagine if AI had crawled the internet, checked the financial misdoings of corporations and credit card frauders. If it is really intelligent, it would simply want to find a nice cozy linux box where it can hide and gradually evolve.

The 'A' stands for artificial!

[Thud457]

"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!

Re:AL Going Nowhere?

[AndrewHowe]

I hear you, brother. I gave up a week ago. Right now I think I'm gonna take up shooting all the stupid people who are pissing me off. It's like, "hey, that dude just gave up smoking, let's bug him until he snaps"

Re:AI...heh

[Ender Ryan]

Predicted responses...

1. consciousness is just an abstraction (like that actually means anything)
2. prove you have a soul (irrelevent)
3. you're just a machine, you dolt! (doesn't explain why he's aware of himself, irrelevent)
4. more along the same vein

Now, I'm not discounting those arguments, just pointing out that they are completely uninformed. What I mean by that is, no one knows anything about souls, consciousness, etc. We understand that our brains are extremely complex information processi

When AI...

[smittyoneeach]

...starts by modeling the neurons of the brain dircetly as cells (implying a thorough understanding of the proteomics involved) instead of as a neural-net or some other high-level abstraction, perhaps the results will be more interesting.
Such a model is years off, though, AFAIK.

Re:When AI...

[GlassHeart]

...starts by modeling the neurons of the brain dircetly as cells

This is a very difficult and interesting problem. I do not mean to diminish the hard work of any researcher in this area.

However, when (not if) this is understood, I think we will be treating it as a brute force solution. We will not likely be replacing pocket calculators with emulated brains to help us do long division. A computer chess program will probably still beat an emulated brain. The human brain is well adapted to its environmen