Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!BU-CS.BU.EDU!bzs
From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: The future of AI
Message-ID: <8806300425.AA05873@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Date: 30 Jun 88 04:25:00 GMT
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Although I don't subscribe to vitalism I'm also not sure that there
isn't some middle ground here (other than with those who insist on
appealing to purely supernatural events, there's really no where to go
from that starting point.)

For example, physics has certainly been dabbling in this century with
very non-deterministic and, importantly, anti-intuitive concepts such
as quantum mechanics.

This leads one to ask if the mind is not in many ways a probability
machine, learning etc simply varying the probability (sometimes to
near zero/one) of certain events happening. It might very well be that
just as we needed group theory and other approaches before we could
even ask the right questions in physics we might very well need a
better way/model to talk about the functions of the mind.

For example, viewing thinking as an n-dimensional probability space
and learning as something deforming that space seems at least
intuitively appealing (therefore it's probably wrong :-) It also may
turn out that trying to separate anything physical from the conscious
is an error and there's very little useful thought that can go on
without experiental sensation, there is a continuum between the
external and internal (note how disruptive experiences like isolation
tanks can be to thinking.) This can be simulated, the notion of an
hallucinating program seems apt.

Another thought that has occurred to me (and others) is that few AI
researchers have the patience (or the grant money!) to put the kind of
time into an AI program that your average parent puts into your
average child (not to mention the number of bits the rest of the world
feeds a child.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University