Rethinking artificial intelligence

Rethinking artificial intelligence
web.mit.edu

Some of the assumptions might be:

- That thought occurs inside the head. To what extent is thought a process distributed across multiple individuals?

- That you can make a sharp delineation between reasoning and perception. Many AI systems assume that tasks like object recognition can be completely separated from the rest of the system as it's own module. Neuroscience, on the other hand, suggests that perception, memory and reasoning are all tightly integrated together.

- That the brain can be modeled as an electrochemical system. The mainstream view is that quantum effects play no significant role, and that Penrose & Hameroff are wrong.

"Part of this difficulty comes from the very nature of the human mind, evolved over billions of years as a complex mix of different functions and systems. “The pieces are very disparate; they’re not necessarily built in a compatible way,” Gershenfeld says. “There’s a similar pattern in AI research. There are lots of pieces that work well to solve some particular problem, and people have tried to fit everything into one of these.” Instead, he says, what’s needed are ways to “make systems made up of lots of pieces” that work together like the different elements of the mind. “Instead of searching for silver bullets, we’re looking at a range of models, trying to integrate them and aggregate them,” he says."

It makes sense to create a single intelligent entity by combining different types of technology that works well on specific topic. We have many good techniques that do things better than human being, why try to mimic ourselves in general (the neuron way) rather than utilize a better solution to each problem?

(This question also goes out to anyone else that has something to add.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

There are various explanations as to the cause of death: the end of the Cold War; the humbling of the mega-monopolies which funded "blue sky" research (mainly AT&T); a general loss of faith resulting from a decades-long lack of progress. Take your pick.

In fact, the entire field of computer science has been stagnant for a while, shiny gadgets to please people with 5-minute attention spans notwithstanding:

http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....

Bureaucrats have replaced thinkers:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...

My advice: study physics or chemistry.