Artificial intelligence was predicted as early as the 1950s but little
progress was made until recently. As everyone knows, computers remain
only about as smart as ants. But I think we are finally seeing the rise
of something similar to artificial intelligence. I think a better word
for it would be substitute intelligence or synthetic machine
intelligence. Two examples have been in the news lately:
1. The autonomous automobile that can drive in normal California
traffic. This came far sooner than most experts predicted, I believe.
2. The IBM Watson computer that will soon compete on the television
Jeopardy game show. That sounds frivolous but the actual performance of
this computer is astounding to me. It is much more impressive than the
chess playing computer that won the world championship some years ago. I
was expecting that all along, whereas Watson's capabilities are unlike
any previous generation of computers. When something like this can be
used in place of today's primitive Google searches it may have a large
impact on society.
There has also been progress in things like machine translation at the
Google site, but this is not as radical where is unexpected as these
two. Google's machine translation capabilities are partly from synthetic
intelligence, but they are augmented or improved by corrections and
suggestions made by bilingual people. There is place to "suggest a
better translation." That is a fine method but it is not revolutionary.
- Jed
- [Vo]:OFF TOPIC The rise of "substitute&... Jed Rothwell
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