I just came across this article in the NYT, about Artificial Intelligence. It made me want to share it, thereby making me a cog in the Artificial Intelligence of the Internet.
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Offtopic, and this may not be your forte as you’re into theoretical physics and not supernerd math, but someone claims to have solved the P=NP problem as P\=NP… any thoughts? (You’re the smartest blogger I read so I figured I’d toss it your way.
)
http://gregbaker.ca/blog/2010/08/07/p-n-np/
As far as I’m concerned, the best part of his proof is that he submitted it in both 10pt and 12 pt font. (Which probably explains why I design wordpress themes and not scientific theories)
Hi Nick:
Considering how notoriously difficult the Clay problems are, I would bet against this paper being a solution. However, I would not bet too much money.
Life is boring and we need frequent excitements. Internet becoming alive and emotional robots with human intelligence are exciting stuff. So this guy is wrong trying to spoil our fun. More than services we need myths.
Gah, that was an astoundingly bad article.
The author seems to consistently blur any distinction between the potential reach of future AI and the current embryonic state of the art, then project that blurriness onto everything he reads and hears about it. He is seemingly unable to distinguish between fanciful claims made by firms for marketing purposes and the cautious explorations of future applications by actual peer-reviewed researchers, so he dismisses the whole field of study as something he doesn’t “believe in”. (Hint: not how science works.) Worst of all, the whole point of the article seems to be that talking about possible future AI capabilities makes him feel icky and uncomfortable with his own self-described “spirituality”, causing him to attack the entire field of study with accusations of being “just a religion”, which he then says threatens his feelings that the public might feel warm and fuzzy about science in general.
Zero stars, NYT.
Hi Melior:
I’m glad you had a strong reaction to the article. It was an op-ed contribution. So it is not an investigative piece of work by a reporter (not the NYT fault in other words). I was mostly interested in it because it describes the way marketers abuse the notion of AI to promote their successes. Most curious is the place where the author works and what his job description entails, so I thought it was a contrarian point of view from an insider that makes you think about it.
I agree with Melior, it was a bad article. Melior’s criticism is pretty much identical to what can be raised against a more hardcore version of Lanier’s article: John Horgan recently attacked the “singularity cult” and Ray Kurzweil
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=singularity-schtick-hi-tech-moguls-2010-06-23
and everything that Melior said about the article you offered can be said – and, actually, has been said – against Horgan’s rant, too. It’s the typical “end of science” diatribe, with all the illogical arguments that “because someone may have exaggerated something, it follows that the progress will have to be zero”, and all this rubbish.
David, I don’t think that Lanier’s vague links to Microsoft Research change anything about the shallowness of the analysis. In some sense, you could guess that Microsoft’s creativity in many subdiscipline is weaker than that of their competition exactly because they often surround themselves with anti-creative people of Lanier’s type.
In fact, you could say that Lanier’s attitude and proclamations are fully analogous to the likes of Swolin and Smoit. We have worked on cutting-edge HEP physics, if not string theory, they would tell you (it’s really preposterous to say that LS has ever worked on string theory), and everything that’s said today must be rubbish and religion. Well, it’s surely not.