Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!gatech!linus!mbunix!bwk
From: bwk@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Limits of AI
Summary: Expanding the frontiers of knowledge, intelligence and wisdom
Keywords: Intelligence
Message-ID: <41427@linus.UUCP>
Date: 31 Oct 88 19:06:49 GMT
References: <1651@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Kort)
Organization: Protoplasmics Ltd., Cleft Chasm, NM
Lines: 23

In article <1651@ndsuvax.UUCP> ncthangi@ndsuvax.UUCP (Sam R. Thangiah ) writes:
> One of the students in my class raised a point that:
> "Man is not capable of producing a machine that is more intelligent than
> oneself".  Is this a valid statement?

It is a valid opinion, but I suspect your classmate's thesis
will be disproved.

FIrst of all, our machines (and our own minds) are not the product
of a single individual.  A consortium of collaborating contributors
can build something that is beyond the power of any one person to
build.  I suspect intelligence falls into this pattern.  Each
generation nurtures children who are more intelligent than their
parents.  My computer can solve problems which I could not solve
on my own.  In some cases, I don't even know what method the computer
is using.  In high school, I learned how to extract square roots by
hand.  My hand calculator does it faster and more accurately by a
method that I never thought of.

Today, I believe that I can reason by analogy better than a computer.
But when it comes to symbolic processing, I cannot compete with
modern Arithmetic/Logic Units or Inference Engines.

--Barry Kort