Thinking a bit about AI this weekend. 30 years ago, we tried to imagine what life would be like in 2010. Intelligent Agents, Strong AI, etc etc. It’s a bit disheartening that the pinnacle of AI that we have to show for our efforts are things like PageRank and phrase-based statistical machine translation.
Not to say that either of these algorithms are bad—on the contrary, they accomplish exactly what they set out to do, and they do it well. But, there’s no magic to them. No glimmer of human-like intelligence behind them. They show us that the major accomplishment of AI for these past few decades is one of statistics (treating measurable phenomena like the trust metric of a website, or how a word in one language corresponds to a word in another) rather than one of intelligence in the more generalizable sense.
I suppose this isn’t a bad thing—the things we build do what they were built to do, after all—but still, the idealistic part of me that grew up reading Asimov and Heinlein… that part of me can’t help but wish that submarines could swim.