Re: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years

(John Wilkins) wrote:
I disagree about AI. Some of the approaches reached the end of their
promoise fairly early (expert systems stuff)

AI expert systems will always underperform humans since they have no
overarching, dynamic conception of the domain in which they operate -
eg, in the case of clinical diagnosis, the expert clinician is able to
conceptualize the body as an interacting system, the AI "expert"
system merely operates on the rules provided to it, which could not
possibly cover all possible combinations and interactions of disease
pathology.

but given that science is
about modelling tractable phenomena, the toy systems of inference and
learning and classification *are* "signs of intelligence"; just not yet
anything more general than that. The goalposts keep moving. As soon as
we explain one aspect of cognition,

Which aspects of cognition have been explained, apart perhaps from
pattern recognition and chess-playing (*)? The real-time production of
articulate speech? The understanding of speech - ie the transformation
of sound into meaning? Motor coordination? Memory (other than the
recall of facts)? Mental arithmetic? Ceativity?

(*) Actually, chess playing, in the Deep Blue sense, has not been
captured - "Deep Blue's evaluation function was initially written in a
generalized form, with many to-be-determined parameters (e.g. how
important is a safe king position compared to a space advantage in the
center, etc.). The optimal values for these parameters were then
determined by the system itself, by analyzing thousands of master
games." (wiki); whatever Deep Blue and systems like it are, they are
not AI, sensu stricto.

the goal then becomes the next and
as yet unexplained aspects of cognition - this is proper, but it means
that it's too easy to insist that there's no progress. "Well yes, we can
now explain *that*, but really, that's not intelligence, is it?"

It would help if, prior to any claims or counter-claims, practitioners
of AI listed (and debated with skeptics) the "aspects of cognition"
that they think need to be "explained" to substatiate the claim that
we understand human intelligence.

Good luck with the synthetic life, by the way...
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

....for that matter, does anyone know what we really mean when we say
that something is "funny"?


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