Artificial Intelligence
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- sarahfailin1
http://www.theatlantic.com/magaz…
“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.”
Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction—like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant—in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think. ///
I'm reading Godel, Escher, Bach right now and it's really amazing in that it strikes at what consciousness really means. Without understanding what thinking and consciousness are, we will not likely develop true sentience in machines. ...unless perhaps by accident. As this article suggests, more modern approaches to AI use huge amounts of data-- basically the recorded thinking of other people-- to make machines seem to be able to think themselves by following the data.