I don't believe AI in the sense of a self-willed mind is going to happen; fortunately, it doesn't need to. The two problems I want to help solve are the global loss of fifty million lives a year, and the difficulty in living in the 99.999...999% of the universe that isn't Earth. Each of these is a problem not of magnitude but of complexity, so to solve them we need better tools for handling complexity.
At present we have marvellous tools for handling human-readable information, but essentially all significant work still needs to be done by humans. Even our richest, most sophisticated and flexible programs are tiny isolated fragments, brittle and opaque, animated step by small painful step only by the constant labor of armies of human workers. We need to do for machine-readable information/procedural knowledge what we have done for text: create a rich, fluid environment in which humans need merely say what we want, and the machines will handle the details of delivering it to us. If we can build tools that powerful, we can start making real progress on the problems of complexity. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
