Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!ncar!gatech!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <1684@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 15 Dec 88 18:00:01 GMT
References: <484@soleil.UUCP> <1654@hp-sdd.HP.COM> <1908@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <IXYmnvy00XoGA0UVFk@andrew.cmu.edu> <4040a289.9d8d@hi-csc.UUCP>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.ai
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 23

In article <4040a289.9d8d@hi-csc.UUCP> harper@hi-csc.UUCP (Paul L. Harper) writes:
>I am continually amazed at the faith of AI "researchers"
>(programmers?). I have seen nothing whatsoever from the AI
>community that indicates there is any hope of producing
>intelligence by running instructions on computers. 
>
>It is an incredible leap of faith, completely unfounded 
>by science, to assume that computers can obtain the human
>quality we call intelligence. Where is the scientific justification
>for the assumption? 

In a hundred and fifty years of neural science that has determined the
primary functions of the elements involved in thought and has but to
determine the architecture before it understands the function
of the whole machine.

This member of the AI community says:  "give me a map of the brain
and I'll make it compose piano sonatas while solving the middle-east
peace problem, and I'll do it all on my little Connection Machine.
Just don't expect it to do it quickly, and don't expect it this
century.  A trillion neurons is a lot of code."

				--Blair
				  "Expert System is an oxymoron."