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From: es@sinix.UUCP (Dr. Sanio)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Building a Brain
Keywords: Artificial Sentient Being, Artificial Wisdom
Message-ID: <880@athen.sinix.UUCP>
Date: 9 Nov 89 08:38:04 GMT
References: <452@uwslh.UUCP> <112300002@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> <78145@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: es@athen.UUCP (Dr. Sanio)
Organization: Siemens AG, K D ST SP4, Munich
Lines: 28

In article <78145@linus.UUCP> bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort) writes:
>
>I think we should build an Artificial Sentient Being by the end
>of the Millenium.  Not just an intelligent and knowledgeable
>information processing system.  A wise being able to discover
>the nature of the world in which it finds itself embedded and
>able to contribute to the invention of a better future.
That reminds me a little on how communist leaders made predictions when
the final state of communism and everlasting abundance should be reached 
since 1930. It was always some decade in ahead. They only needed a bit more
progress in technology and organization ...
With that "final frontier" of "hard" AI, it's very similar. The first predic-
tions came up in the fifties: yet a bit more memory, faster cpu and periphs,
then it will be done. Whilst hardware evolved some powers faster than every-
body predicted, progress of AI was mainly finding out new problems even to
come closer to the original goal - somehow like hunting the rainbow.
To prove the goal to be feasable/impossible, my proposal would be to concentrate
on simulating the most simple and best researched biological systems, say in-
sects, which are lots closer to an automaton than e.g. rodents (that task
seems too hard for AI, IMHO). Simulating would mean covering all aspects of
neural activity of those systems (as far as biologists researched it - maybe
that research has to be pushed in order to get the specification).
Doing that up to the end of the milennium (or proving even that to be to hard)
would uncover what AI is able to do.
Recently, our best automatically driven cars, trains, missiles etc seem 
utterly primitive to me compared with worms, ants, or flies .
>--Barry Kort
regards, es