Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
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Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
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Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#2> Early robots were put through their paces.
Including, if the rumours are to believed, early exercises in teledildonics.
(search engines are not confirming at the moment; it would've been late-60's early-70's and the way I heard the story, the geeks at SAIL were shocked —but not that shocked— to discover that two coeds who answered an ad seeking "open minded individuals" turned out to be even freer of hangups than had been hoped... Or have my aging neurons misattributed these antics from a different AI lab?)
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#3...and then came the first AI winter. Which will certainly happen again, this time, only a few years later ;-)
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#4...and then came the first AI winter. Which will certainly happen again, this time, only a few years later ;-)
Why do you think there'll be an AI winter? And in what form — stagnation of neural-network based technologies, a change in the overall paradigm of learning-from-data, or something else altogether?
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#5...and then came the first AI winter. Which will certainly happen again, this time, only a few years later ;-)
I'm hoping the current crop of ML/AI yields sufficiently commercially viable blindsight behavior [1] to fund continuing research into AGI. Generative LLM seems sufficiently sophisticated to write ad copy and general political speech of all kinds, so if that's the direction we go I can see all kinds of interesting possible implications. I'd like to see baking in positive optimism and collaboration into the DNA of solutions delivered by such blindsight systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Major...
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#6From the Shameless Self-Promotion Dep't:
My book https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future has a chapter set in 1979 or so, at the Dutch Goose, where AI Winter 1.0 is fully underway:
===== So, Grant brought up one more thing before they left the topic of work. “What do you guys think about artificial intelligence? Is that ever going to go anywhere?”
Porter chuckled, “There’s a paper from a few years back called ‘Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity.’ You might want to read that.” The other guys laughed.
Patrick announced, “I’ll never forget his opening line, ‘As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery.’”
Porter sat back with a wide grin, “I think they crossed that border several years ago. That’s why they can’t get any more funding.”
Ray said, “Hey, the big breakthrough is only 10 years away. And always will be!”
Grant had the strong impression from their approving looks that they weren’t impressed with AI. He wasn’t ready to give up quite yet, “Didn’t they do some cool stuff, like Blocks World? I loved how you could say ‘pick up a big red block,’ and it did it.”
Ray interrupted, “Winograd’s around all the time. You could talk to him.”
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#7MIT's PDP-10 OS, ITS, was unrelated to TOPS-10 and in fact predated it (it was the first OS on the PDP-6). AFAIK, SAIL's PDP-10 OS, WAITS, was also written from scratch, as it started on the '6 as well. I DOUBT DEC every provided a PDP-6 OS anyway as it was a research machine manufactured in small volume mainly designed for LISP.
ITS's name, Incompatible Timeshare System, came from a prior MIT OS, CTSS ("Compatible Time Sharing System"). I never learned what it might have been compatible with as it was long gone by the time I showed up at MIT.
WAITS supposedly got its name as a joke on ITS, but you'd have to ask Les Earnest for the real story.
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#8...and then came the first AI winter. Which will certainly happen again, this time, only a few years later ;-)
Why do you think there'll be an AI winter? And in what form — stagnation of neural-network based technologies, a change in the overall paradigm of learning-from-data, or something else altogether?
The next AI winter will be caused by very needy physical robots walking around the world acting like little kids, trying to train their models.
They will ask "what are you doing?" and then the dreaded "why?" about everything. They will annoy the crap out of everyone to the point where we just pack the whole thing up for twenty years.
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#9> Early robots were put through their paces. Including, if the rumours are to believed, early exercises in teledildonics. (search engines are not confirming at the moment; it would've been late-60's early-70's and the way I heard the story, the geeks at SAIL were shocked —but not that shocked— to discover that two coeds who answered an ad seeking "open minded individuals" turned out to be even freer of hangups than h…
The "farewell address" from the WAITS machine included a reference to the event.
Re: Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think there'll be an AI winter? And in what form — stagnation of neural-network based technologies, a change in the overall paradigm of learning-from-data, or something else altogether?
The next AI winter will be caused by very needy physical robots walking around the world acting like little kids, trying to train their models. They will ask "what are you doing?" and then the dreaded "why?" about everything. They will annoy the crap out of everyone to the point where we just pack the whole thing up for twenty years.
“Why?” To which any Animaniacs fan will respond, “OK, love you, bye-bye!”.