[FRIAM] have we moved on?

[Phil Henshaw]

Right, funding makes a big difference, but ever if we spend part of our
days serving bean counters does it control the direction of scientific
thought?     I think it's often the other way around too, that what
scientists find interesting to explore is what they're able to sell.
In that regard, helping Government, and others, learn what to expect
from uncontrolled systems could be just as interesting and marketable as
offering limited ways to control them.   You could present it as
advances in 'steering', like how to read ahead on the curves so your
mid-course corrections can  be early, small and graceful rather than
late, large and clumsy... but then, government does seem to enjoy the
latter so very much, perhaps we couldn't persuade them to give it up! :)


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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