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Nine Things You Should Know About AI

1 pointsby davesailerover 3 years ago

2 comments

dalyover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve been involved in things originally called &quot;AI&quot; for most of my &quot;career&quot;, such as it was. I&#x27;ve worked in a lot of, as they were called at the time, Artificial Intelligence projects. Of course, once they moved into the implementation phase they were no longer AI. For example, I worked on natural language understanding, robots, machine vision, neural networks, expert systems, speech recognition, touch sensing, self-reproducing systems, path planning, assembly planning, malware detection, computer algebra, knowledge representation, and human-robot interaction.<p>Russell states: &quot;I want to be clear that we are a long way from achieving general purpose AI&quot;.<p><i>I</i> want to be clear that anyone who talks about &quot;general purpose AI&quot; is failing to define their terms clearly. In fact, I suspect that any definition would exclude most, if not all, humans.<p>Rod Brooks is probably closest when he discusses the idea of learning at the 1-year, 2-year, 5-year, etc. levels of self-learning.<p>When you hear the phrases &quot;Artificial General Intelligence&quot; or &quot;General Purpose AI&quot; you should insist on a clear, exact definition. Otherwise the discussion is about nothing, basically pop-philosophy.
dalyover 3 years ago
Russell defines &quot;intelligence&quot; as &quot;machines that achieve their objectives&quot;. My toaster certainly achieves its objective of making toast. It even uses feedback from a sensor to know when it has achieved the goal.<p>It is not the achieving of objectives that motivates me. It is the defining of objectives, otherwise known as choosing research goals. Usually I find that the original research goals change, grow more complex, and spawn yet more goals. It is the &quot;side-effect&quot; of learning that motivates my efforts, not the achievement of goals.<p>It is, of course, open to debate whether I&#x27;m a &quot;general purpose intelligence&quot;. I would be the first to argue that I am not. There are areas, like writing good music, which despite my years-long best efforts are a complete failure. I can&#x27;t understand why I fail.