Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!ms
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ms@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede)
Subject: Re: AI - the real problem
Message-ID: <91Jan31.185653est.20968@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <22951@well.sf.ca.us>
Distribution: comp
Date: 31 Jan 91 23:57:17 GMT
Lines: 34

nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:


>     It's been thirty-two years since Samuels' checkers program, the first
>major success of AI.  And yet we still can't build something with the
>competence of an ant brain in dealing with the real world.  This is
>discouraging.

<lines deleted>

>competence until we can build rodent-level brains.  And until we have achieved
>primate-level competence, we will not successfully build a general-purpose
>human-level AI.

>     However, we just might succeed working from the bottom up.
>     This, not undecidability, is the problem with AI.

It is, of course, a problem only if the goal of AI is to build a general-purpose
human-level AI, as you state it. Not everybody subscribes to this view, though.

If there is a problem with AI at all, I should think, then it is the one that 
the community is unable to agree on the nature of the discipline and its goals,
but nevertheless engages in discussions on "the problem with AI". Quite often, 
these debates are bound to remain fruitless, because people just start out from
totally diverging assumptions.

Maybe the problem, if it exists, started when the field was christened 'AI'?
This seems to be the only discipline that advertises its long-term ambitions,
however nebulous, in its very title, instead of choosing a more neutral one.

Maybe there are in fact two or many more fields, hidden under a common title 
which sounds exciting and is likely to ease the process of grant hunting?

Maybe written by Manfred Stede, ms@ai.toronto.edu