Robots again

From: David Wollmann <dwollmann_at_ibmhelp.com>
Date: Mon Mar 16 04:59:28 1998

At 04:34 AM 3/16/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Exactly. All of the useful ideas from AI that became mainstream are no
>longer considered AI. Today, OCR, speach recognition, machine
>translation, and predictive analysis are off-the-shell apps or embedded in
>products like Microsoft Word to help catch your spelling and grammar
>errors.

What was once the stuff of science fiction epics is now mundane?

>
>There are still interesting problems, though. Machines can kick your
>chess-playing butt, but you won't find one nearly coordinated enough to
>hit a baseball and run around a few bases. IMHO, AI researchers have
>overestimated the brainstuff and underestimated the sensor and actuator
>stuff. Here's my theory of how you learn to speak, for example:
>

I have always thought that digital computers would never allow us to
achieve the ultimate goal of replicting a learning organism. Aren't we just
simple conceptual pattern recognition machines? It seems like an analog
computer, capable of integration of raw percepts and conceptualization at
high speeds, could actually learn and become better and faster than man at
thinking and working. If a computer could search a text file for a pattern
using the same method as humans, i.e. looking for a shape as the first
indicator of a match, rather than a discreet chacter pattern, it would be
able to process text much faster than a digital machine.

I think it was Ayn Rand's "Objectivist Epistemology" that got me thinking
along these lines.

>
>-- Doug
>
>


--
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Received on Mon Mar 16 1998 - 04:59:28 GMT

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