Look, guys, sure, in some sense computing is part of
the best promise for AI. Fine. I'll even agree that
at least for now computing is necessary.
But, note, nearly everything we've done in computing,
especially in Silicon Valley for the past 15 years, has
been to apply routine software development to
work that we already well understood how to do
manually. A small fraction of the efforts have been
some excursions into more, but these have been
relatively few and with rarely very impressive
results. Net, what Silicon Valley does know how to
do is build, say, SnapChat (right, it keeps the NSA
spooks busy looking at the SnapChat intercepts
from Sweden!).
But for anything that should be called AI,
there is another challenge that is very much
necessary -- how to do that. Or, if you will,
write the software design documents from the
top down to the level of the individual
programming statements. Problem is, very likely
and apparently, no one knows how the heck to do
that.
Given a candidate design, people should want to
review it, and about the only way to convince
people, e.g., short of the running software passing
the Turing test or some such, is to write out the
design in terms of mathematics. Basically the only
solid approach is via mathematics; essentially
everything else is heuristics to be validated only
in practice, that is, an implementation and not
a design.
Thing is, I very much doubt that anyone knows how
to write a design with such mathematics. If so,
then long ago there should have been such in
an AI journal or with DARPA funding.
Basically, bluntly, no one knows how to write
software for anything real about AI. Sorry 'bout that.
Wby? We just do not know hardly anything about
how the brain works. We don't know more about how
the human brain works than my kitty cat
knows about how my computer works. Sorry 'bout that. And
AI software will have a heck of a time catching up
with my kitty cat.
By analogy, we don't know more about how to
program AI than Leonardo da Vinci knew about
how to build a Boeing 777. Heck the Russians
didn't even know how to build an SR-71. Da Vinci
could draw a picture of a flying machine, but
he had no clue about how to build one. Heck,
Langley fell into the Potomac River! Instead, the
Wright brothers built a useful wind tunnel (didn't
understand Reynolds number), actually were able to
calculate lift, drag, thrust, and engine horsepower,
and had found a solution to three axis control --
Langley failed at those challenges, and da Vinci
was lost much farther back in the woods.
We now know how our daughters can avoid
cervical cancer. Before the solution, "we dance
'round and 'round and suppose, and the secret
sits in the middle, and knows.", and we didn't
know. Well, the cause was HPV, and now there
is a vaccine. Progress. Possible? Yes. Easy?
No. AI? We're not close enough to be in the
same solar system. F'get about AI.