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November 15, 2005
Old versus New AI
I just returned from the International Semantic Web conference in Galway. A very good conference delivering a large number of important papers and convincing me that semantic Web applications are beginning to emerge into the real world..
But later I was discussing AI techniques with some folks at PARC and at Adobe the other day and a couple of questions arose.
My comment was that while the current crop of AI techniques work and work well, they do not reflect what we do when we reason or when we perform instinctual activities. The question came back, "Does a computer have to do things the way we do to be intelligent."
My answer was "no, not at all". You cannot argue with the success of fuzzy logic, vision processing algorithms that are increasingly able to understand the contents and purpose of photos, document understanding systems that can restate the menaning of text in new words. These are all amazingly powereful and successful technologies.
However, my other comment was that it would be fascinating to work on the other problem, to reproduce what we do when we think, plan, understand, and create And I do not believe we will achieve emergent intelligence similar to our own until we pursue that harder and less travelled path.