I like Chomsky, but when it comes to AI he is speaking as a somewhat cynical pragmatist but not a theorist. That's fine (to use Chomsky's line), but we cannot simply throw all the advancements made in AI and dismiss them as if we actually know that they do not shed light on how the mind works. Now his comments on the pragmatism of developing translators using brute force is much more insightful because it concerns a subject that he has some outstanding expertise in.
My argument that I believe that a text-only program can learn a simple context sensitive language is related to this. No, the program would not have audio, visual and tactile experiences (similar to a human child) which it could use to associate with the referents of the language. OK. So what? The study of artificial intelligence does not have to concern a perfect imitation of a human mind. It has to concern the study of relations between referents which have the ability to develop insights about those kinds of 'things'. If you want to dismiss this as something that is different from (strong) AI that is ok, but to dismiss it as an area of study that cannot shed any light on how the mind works is simply a dismissive conjecture. If I could get my text-only AI program to work then I could adapt it to work with other IO modalities. (I would need a lot of help with the robotics part of course, but I don't see myself ever working on robotic applications.) I think the singularity idea is exaggerated. I don't really think that the study of the singularity is an interesting area of research. I am talking about his comments about AI. On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 4:56 PM, tintner michael <[email protected]>wrote: > Pretty good talk - > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kICLG4Zg8s > > Key section - c. 15.00-21.00 > > Language understanding, navigation - let alone the nature of thought - > still hard problems.. > > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/24379807-f5817f28> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
