Posted on 10/12/2003 10:02:58 PM PDT by sourcery
The history of AI is embarrassing. Too many researchers with lots of ego and little fundamental justification shooting off at the mouth. The field is/was valid, but from a public perspective, it was poisoned by idiots. That it attracted more than its share of eccentric cranks didn't help. Research hasn't stopped, but most everyone keeps busily quiet now that nobody pays attention any more.
That said, a LOT of progress has been made in recent years with respect to AI, fundamental progress, to the extent that we've done more in the last five years than the previous forty. While there isn't any fanfare, the puzzle is finally starting to unravel, thanks in large part to some important mathematical breakthroughs that allowed the fundamental problem to be characterized. But since most researchers are gun shy these days, you won't hear about any kind of AI until it is extremely mature. That the current state of the art defies intuition and really can't be easily explained to anyone but other mathematicians in the appropriate fields despite being extremely elegant doesn't help either. At least things like "neural nets" could be summed up in a catchy soundbites.
I will say, as a mathematician tangentially associated with the AI community, that the capabilities developed in the last few years far exceed what you probably think is possible, and that it uses algorithms/technologies that essentially no layman has ever heard of.
P.S. The speed of your processor has little to do with why your computer is so stupid. That "we don't have computers fast enough" is a common misperception; CPU speed has nothing to do with intelligence except in the most pathological case. The bottleneck in hardware performance is elsewhere.
Except that most of the research is being done by private industry and by numerous companies, including many very big and established ones. Not only that, if you follow that general field you will notice that advances are being made VERY fast. As I said earlier, I am intimately familiar with the field as an observer and even I am somewhat stunned by the blinding pace of improvements and discoveries. I honestly did not think they would be hitting milestones as fast as they are, and I considered myself a fairly well-informed optimist.
In some ways, this is actually quite a bit easier than fusion research. The nature of the problems are simpler and easy to do research on, all things considered.
Except that most of the research is being done by private industry and by numerous companies, including many very big and established ones. Not only that, if you follow that general field you will notice that advances are being made VERY fast
In 1985 I did some contract work for a company that claimed to be researching "artificial intelligence" along with a lot of other buzzwords. They had a guy at the front desk guy working the phones full time giving this line of bull to potential investors and writing up press releases. It was sad because I knew one of the programmers who told me how their demos were all faked, etc. They took the money and ran.
Remember the dot-com crash? Same thing. Same old stuff. And big & established companies have in the past been taken over by scoundrels. Happens all the time. Remember Enron?
(Says "Nano OK!")
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6305257442.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
Oh. A virus.
The idea of trillions of "Robot bugs" searching for submarines, etc. wins the "Pull It, Sir" award for Science Fiction this week.
More nano BS.
Let's just say I'm wary of "problems" where the "solution" is to write the messenger a check ;)
It is necessary for the U.S. political establishment to understand what is going on. Then the right steps will be taken...But in the last eight years or so, China was the American holy cow, and we have had no funds to carry on our research of China and the enlightenment of the West...Since our Center for the Survival of Western Democracies began to regard China, and not Russia, as the key geostrategic player, the donations to our organization stopped. My assistants work without pay or with a token pay. We need a top-level publicist at $10,000 for four months, Chinese translators at $100 a week, etc.
After the AI people went underground, a new breed of structural engineering students arose in the 1990's. They were promising a revolution in engineering analysis where expert systems would guide a design engineer through a project. The engineer would interact with the program answering queations, whatever that meant, and the program would knowingly come up with an optimized design all the while meeting the needs of complex set of engineering rules. Graduate students were writing their theses on this subject. Then the term ‘fuzzy logic’ made it into the lexicon of structural engineering academics. All of a sudden, these proponents appear to have gone underground. I’m still working with a stupid finite matrix analysis program that has an up-to-date windows interface. As time wears on, I become increasing impressed with how much our intuition guides our lives and thinking and how little that rigorous logic no matter how fuzzy is ever applied.
Yup. Gotta be suspicious there.
On a serious note...I don't know if ANYBODY is ready for this or the likely consequences. There's a joke in the nanotechnology research community: we can expect to have nanoassemblers in fifty years if we're lucky. If we're not lucky, then we'll have 'em in twenty.
Are you at liberty to disclose what these improvements are and what implcations they have?
Forgive me if you've already done so.
Physics...not Psychic.. :)
No, I read about twenty or thirty years ago that the Russian military was into all kinds of supernatural mind-reading, mind-control and telekinetic crap. It may be a put-on but it's amazing the people who believe in these pseudo-sciences. Even Democratic candidate General Wesley Clark thinks we should work on time travel.
Like I say, though, I don't know if they really believe in it or if the people who research nanotechnology are sincere. One thing is sure, like with cold fusion, a lot of naive people are going to be separated from their money. There are a lot of crooks in the world and not all of them carry a gun.
Have a little faith,
That smooth-talking guy working the phones just loves it when people have faith in him.
also did you hear about IBM figuring out how to hold computer memory at the atomic level.
Chemists and solid state physicists have been getting better at designing molecules and surfaces with specific geometry for years. There is nothing new about layers one molecule thick. That's what these guys do -- they point to conventional research and try to characterize it as nanotechnology. That's a long way from self-replicating machines.
For every one of those companies, there are a dozen companies that are actually in the business of being in business i.e. accomplishing something useful. Just because it makes good press when there is a scandal doesn't mean it is representative of the industry. Give me a break. If, as you seem to be saying, the entire tech industry was a bunch of charlatans, we would not be seeing the rapid real-world progress that we are actually seeing.
As for dotcoms, I work in Silicon Valley and every single startup that I worked at during the dotcom boom is still in business and making money. The stack of stocks, options, warrants, etc I collected during the boom are all good. You've probably never heard of any of the companies, but that is your problem, not mine. The stock market is neither the industry nor the economy. Just because the market crashed from the perspective of the idiot investors who drove it up does not mean that the fundamental economic engine that was underneath the dotcom expansion hasn't continued to grow. In fact, the "dotcom economy" has continued to grow; the "crash" was in the market, mostly because the "dotcom economy" didn't grow as fast as people wanted, not because it was shrinking. This is like how the Democrats in congress call a reduction in budget growth a "budget cut". A lot of nonsense for the consumption of fools.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.