AI has some fundamental problems including:
-- In order to understand a little about something, you have to know a lot about everything
-- Computers have no good mechanism to integrate new information in its proper context the first time
-- Computers might be able to eventually recognize context, but it would involve a lot of failure (which people tend to put up with from other people, but not from computers)
-- And (last but not least), no one really understands how the human brain represents, stores, and retrieves information and creates usable knowlege.
Until you solve the above problems, AI will go nowhere fast. I always get a chuckle when so called "scholars" say that AI is just a matter of adding processing power. Its all about information organization and management.
how refreshing to hear a fact-based, thoroughly accurate technical discussion here. AI is a field that has struggled to little avail, making only incremental progress over the years. Not that people shouldn't keep trying...
I'm all in favor of darpa but the current head (Tony Tether) knows nothing about AI and up til now has been extremely reluctant to fund anything like this whatsoever--good judgement up to this point. Not sure what changed, though there's been all sorts of darpa programs for advanced AI development during his tenure that never even got funded in the last several years. Tether has a cold-war mindset and micromanages darpa; most program managers dislike him for it, but as far as AI goes, he's probably doing taxpayers a favor.
I agree w/Steely Tom: this project will go the way of so many that came before it--utter obscurity. Shame.
You raise some good points. And then there's also the possibility that you just have to be alive to be intelligent, no matter how much processing power and memory storage you have at your disposal.
It might be possible that in terms of common sense and actual awareness of itself in the world, even the fastest supercomputer will always be dumb as a bag of hammers.
This is an interesting point but I would contend that this is precisely what human beings go through to learn anything. And we make a LOT of mistakes on the way to perfection.
First we learn some very basic fundamentals; spatial sense; sense of being; sense of others. This is infant-hood.
Later we learn to walk, talk, play, which is toddler-hood.
We grow and learn for the next several years, which correlates nicely from childhood through the teens, before becoming truly functional adults. Many never get that far (Dems, LoL!).
True AI will probably take a similar track to learning. Expecting out-of-the-box AI is too much. It might not take 18 years to get a functioning AI, but I'd say at least a couple years of learning would produce a better product.