Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!clyde!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut!tanner From: tanner@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mike Tanner) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Goal of AI: where are we going? Message-ID: <259@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: Thu, 1-Oct-87 08:49:39 EDT Article-I.D.: tut.259 Posted: Thu Oct 1 08:49:39 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 6-Oct-87 00:45:42 EDT References: <178@usl> <549@csm9a.UUCP> <270@uwslh.UUCP> Reply-To: tanner%tut.cis.ohio-state.edu@osu-eddie.UUCP (Mike Tanner) Organization: The Ohio State University, CIS Dept. Lines: 46 In article <270@uwslh.UUCP> lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Christopher Lishka) writes: >In article <549@csm9a.UUCP> bware@csm9a.UUCP (Bob Ware) writes: >>We all admit that the human mind is not flawless. Bias decisions... > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > [the underscored bit above indicates a number of faulty assumptions, > e.g., that it makes sense to talk about "flaws" in the mind.] > I liked this reply. Whether the problem is "western" philosophy or not, I'm not sure. It may be true for the casual AI dabbler. I.e., the average intelligent person on first thinking or hearing of the topic of AI will often say things like, "But people make mistakes, do you really want to build human-like machines?" Within AI itself this attitude manifests itself as rampant normativism. Somebody adopts a model of so-called correct reasoning, e.g., Bayesian decision theory, logic, etc., and then assumes that the abundant empirical evidence that people are unable to reason this way shows human reasoning to be flawed. These people want to build "correct" reasoning machines. I say, OK, go ahead. But that's not what I want to do. I want to understand thinking, intelligent information processing, problem-solving, etc. And I think the empirical evidence is trying to tell us something important. I am not sure just what. It seems clear that thinking is not logical (which is not to say "flawed" or "incorrect", merely "not logical"). An interesting question is, "why not?" People are able to use language, solve problems -- to think -- but is that in spite of illogic or because of it or neither? I don't think we're going to understand intelligence by adopting an a priori correct model and trying to build machines that work that way (except by negative results). If you want to say that what I'm doing is not AI, fine. I think it is, but if you'll give me a better name I'll take it and leave AI to the logicians. It is not psychology (my experiments involve building programs and generally thinking about computational issues, not torturing college freshmen). And I'm not really interested in duplicating the human mind, it's just that the human mind is the only intelligence I know. -- mike tanner Dept. of Computer and Info. Science tanner@ohio-state.arpa Ohio State University ...cbosgd!osu-eddie!tanner 2036 Neil Ave Mall Columbus, OH 43210