What the father of AI said in 1978 may not be that far from the truth even today
Near the end of the research stage of his career, in 1978, McCarthy had to give up on his purist idea of artificial intelligence: “To succeed, artificial intelligence needs 1.7 Einsteins, two Maxwells five Faradays and the funding of 0.3 Manhattan Projects,” he resignedly recognized.
Instead of harnessing the prodigious intellect of the luminaries John McCarthy listed there, in today's world we throw the Amazon Mechanical Turk to prepare large volumes of test and training data so the AI may become smarter over time. It's not hard to see why that does not end up happening. We are not quite solving the need equation that McCarthy had so succinctly proposed. Instead we are hoping a million monkeys at the piano pounding away will wrap up Schubert's Unfinished Symphony one of these days.
Our brute force efforts at teasing intelligence from machines have certainly lead to hyper targeted marketing, rampant invasion of privacy, learning our preferences only to trap us into bubbles we cannot escape. I am not sure that is the AI McCarthy was dreaming of when he came up with the idea.
Near the end of the research stage of his career, in 1978, McCarthy had to give up on his purist idea of artificial intelligence: “To succeed, artificial intelligence needs 1.7 Einsteins, two Maxwells five Faradays and the funding of 0.3 Manhattan Projects,” he resignedly recognized.
Instead of harnessing the prodigious intellect of the luminaries John McCarthy listed there, in today's world we throw the Amazon Mechanical Turk to prepare large volumes of test and training data so the AI may become smarter over time. It's not hard to see why that does not end up happening. We are not quite solving the need equation that McCarthy had so succinctly proposed. Instead we are hoping a million monkeys at the piano pounding away will wrap up Schubert's Unfinished Symphony one of these days.
Our brute force efforts at teasing intelligence from machines have certainly lead to hyper targeted marketing, rampant invasion of privacy, learning our preferences only to trap us into bubbles we cannot escape. I am not sure that is the AI McCarthy was dreaming of when he came up with the idea.
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