16 Mar
1998
16 Mar
'98
4:59 a.m.
At 04:34 AM 3/16/98 -0600, you wrote:
Exactly. All of the useful ideas from AI that became
mainstream are no
longer considered AI. Today, OCR, speach recognition, machine
translation, and predictive analysis are off-the-shell apps or embedded in
products like Microsoft Word to help catch your spelling and grammar
errors.
What was once the stuff of science fiction epics is now mundane?
There are still interesting problems, though. Machines can kick your
chess-playing butt, but you won't find one nearly coordinated enough to
hit a baseball and run around a few bases. IMHO, AI researchers have
overestimated the brainstuff and underestimated the sensor and actuator
stuff. Here's my theory of how you learn to speak, for example:
I have always thought that digital computers would never allow us to
achieve the ultimate goal of replicting a learning organism. Aren't we just
simple conceptual pattern recognition machines? It seems like an analog
computer, capable of integration of raw percepts and conceptualization at
high speeds, could actually learn and become better and faster than man at
thinking and working. If a computer could search a text file for a pattern
using the same method as humans, i.e. looking for a shape as the first
indicator of a match, rather than a discreet chacter pattern, it would be
able to process text much faster than a digital machine.
I think it was Ayn Rand's "Objectivist Epistemology" that got me thinking
along these lines.
-- Doug
--
David Wollmann |
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