Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are <i>definitely</i> not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to believe that an 'AI revolution' is on.<p>According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy search results that still need further interpretation. (google 'what is the color of grass' for a nice example of AI in action, any three year old would tell you 'green' is the answer, not a bunch of links).<p>The 'AI winter' was not brought on by a lack of progress or interesting results, it was mostly brought on by it being used as buzz word hyping the notion of AI long before even baby steps had been made in the field, and this article fits right in with the over-selling of AI. An ABS system is AI? Please.<p>As of now we do not know if there will ever be something that we would call an AI but just like with pornography, I'll know it when I see it, and an inventory control system, no matter how clever it appears is not it, especially not if it took a bunch of programmers to write.<p>I think the one thing that will set a true AI off against the background of wanna-be AI systems is that a true AI can be taught by non programmers to reason about the world around it and draw meaningful conclusions without external input. We are still - in my opinion at least - very far away from anything that comes close to that.<p>Learning is the key to AI, not programming.
"The computers are in control, and we just live in their world"<p>No, <i>we</i> are ostensibly in control, or at least the humans who know how to program and control this type of system are. Like any machine or complex system, it may fly out of our control, but it is not in some other entity's control at that point, it's just out of control. We're not to the point of facing a true artificial intelligence, yet...
A.I. is probably one of the most exciting concepts I know of, yet if you think about it the somewhat disappointing utilitarian "reality" of A.I. is what makes sense. For example why are no other species as intelligent as humans? Are they just slow evolvers, or suck at evolving? Are humans just blessed evolvers to achieve intelligence before everybody else? No, survival is a purely utilitarian exercise. You find a stable niche and fill it, or die. In other words humans and their brains have just stumbled upon a particular pattern of living (what with language and societies and "intelligence") that is currently "stable". What if in 500 years all humans are extinct, yet bacteria still happily do their thing. Would we still consider humans so 'intelligent'? The same rule applies to processes embodied in silicon as to processes embodied in carbon. And for as intelligent as we humans think we are, we are very bad at predicting where the next stable niche will be (otherwise we'd all be millionaire entrepreneurs). This is why when "A.I." finds a stable niche in areas like search engines and warehouse management, we are both surprised and a bit disappointed.
AI is the sexiest, most romanticized and misunderstood fields in computer science. Certainly, it never ceases to generate boring article topics for Wired.
My Multiagent Systems class at UT Austin (taught by Peter Stone) discussed the Kiva system, along with many, many other topics pertaining to AI today.<p>A couple of videos about Kiva: <a href="http://www.raffaello.name/KivaSystems.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.raffaello.name/KivaSystems.html</a><p>A paper on Kiva: <a href="http://www.raffaello.name/Assets/Publications/CoordinatingHundreds.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.raffaello.name/Assets/Publications/CoordinatingHu...</a><p><a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Courses/344Mfall10/assignments/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Courses/344Mfall10/assignme...</a> has all of the readings for the class (with more on the 'resources' page). If you want to learn something about AI, it's certainly a good place to start!<p>If you're more into the algorithms side of AI, you should certainly read AI: A Modern Approach (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approach-3rd/dp/0136042597" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approac...</a>). It's a text book, don't get me wrong, but it clearly explains many relevant algorithms in AI today with accompanying pseudocode and theory. If you've got a CS background, it's a great reference/learning tool. I bought mine for a class, and won't be returning it!
"Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks."<p>The second sentence is basically my model for how the human brain works.