On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Jason Etheridge wrote:
> <snip>
>> In my experience, the fulfillment of the big promises of AI are always
>> "just 5 or 10 years" away.
>
> To be fair to AI, I think the goal posts keep shifting. Will AI ever
> be able to do everything a human can do? No idea. Can AI do some
> things better than humans now? Indubitably.
I agree with this; the goal posts do shift. One of the great ironies of
AI is that once a computer can do something that only humans could do, we
no longer think of it as artificial intelligence. For example, everyone
on this list who has ever interacted with a phone navigation system that
uses voice recognition (likely most of us, I would guess) has used a
system that incorporates AI technology. But it is rare for us to think of
them as AI, in my experience.
> Can computers solve all problems? No. Some things are not
> computable. Can humans? Maybe with computers. :) Are we becoming so
> enmeshed with our technology that one day there might not be a
> difference between biological and machine intelligence?
Jason, you sound like a fan (or at least a reader) of Ray Kurzweil. =) I
know he makes a pretty convincing argument for this possibility in _The
Age of Spiritual Machines_.
Marijane White
Masters Candidate
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Received on Wed Sep 05 2007 - 10:19:06 EDT