[FRIAM] have we moved on?

[Pamela McCorduck]

Artificial intelligence as a field "talks about" just about  
everything.  We mustn't confuse what the funding agencies demand  
(who, after all, call the tune in most instances, about what  
direction research will take) and what the scientists would wish, or  
even talk about quite publicly.  If you read the presidential essays  
of each new president of the Association for the Advancement of  
Artificial Intelligence, the main professional society of AI, you  
will see wonderful proposals for what the field might be and how it  
might be done.  DARPA wants reliable robot cars, thanks anyway.

There's a melancholy moment at the end of the film where Marvin  
Minsky talks about the grand ideas of the founding fathers of AI, and  
the way the field has instead become fixated on incremental  
improvements in performance--owing to that's where the money is.

I've noticed that people often scoff because the game of Go has never  
had a real AI challenge.  I agree that Go is wonderfully complex,  
difficult, a tough nut to crack.  But research toward an automatic Go  
machine has been the sole province of non-funded amateurs for sweet  
forever.  It's possible--not necessarily guaranteed--that a major,  
well-funded effort might crack the problem.  Nobody who has any money  
could imagine what use it would be, unfortunately.

So for big ideas: for the first fifty years of AI, the dream was to  
build a killer chess machine.  Why?  Because this was considered the  
sine qua non of intelligent behavior.  Never mind that you wouldn't  
particularly want a chess master as your dinner partner; this  
reflected our view of what intelligence was at the time.  We have our  
killer chess machine and we (and the chess players, Kasparov says)  
have learned a lot from the effort.

But the grand goal for the next fifty years is a robot soccer team  
that will defeat a human team in the World's Cup.  Think of what this  
means: planning, cooperating with other autonomies, kinetic  
intelligence, real-time calculations, and so forth.  It seems to me a  
worthy successor to the chess champion.  If I'm lucky, it will happen  
sooner than fifty years, and I'll get to see it for myself.  If not,  
not.

And, FWIW, this idea for a grand challenge bubbled up from workers-- 
young workers--in the field, and was not proposed by a funding  
agency.  Other grand ideas are being pursued on a shoestring by other  
young researchers.  I can talk about them, OR--you can buy the new  
edition of my Machines Who Think, which addresses some of these  
contemporary issues.

There will be more to talk about when I show the film in December.

Pamela





"For some reason the most vocal Christians among us never mention the  
Beatitudes.  But with tears in their eyes they demand that the Ten  
Commandments be posted in public places.  And of course that's Moses,  
not Jesus.  I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the  
Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere."

  Kurt Vonnegut, "A Man Without A Country"


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