Saturday, July 26, 2003

I read with some happiness today that Marvin Minsky declared Artificial Intelligence research “brain-dead.” [inessential.com] Minsky's idea of AI, a solipsistic “common sense” unable to feel, learn, and act, is indeed brain-dead. Coding up a tangle of “common sense knowledge” is useless if the terms of that knowledge are not endowed with meaning by their causal connection to perception and action. The grand challenge is how meaning emerges from a combination of genetically wired circuitry and learning. That's where much of the research is going, appropriately. In opposing “analog” and “digital,” Brent and others are really talking about other oppositions: embodied, evolved against disembodied, engineered. What we don't know is how to boot up effective embodied agents (which for technical reasons will likely be digital), let alone ones that keep doing what we want and expect when operating autonomously in the “analog” world. 4:52:34 PM