On 17/02/2011 3:55 PM, Patrick Durusau wrote:
> Leo,
>
> I don't question any of the statements that John has made.
>
> The problem is equating those achievements, which are considerable, with
> intelligence.
>
> Despite the achievement with Watson, it could not cross the street
> unassisted.
We don't let 3 year olds cross a street unassisted.
People with disabilities can't cross a street unassisted.
> Not very "intelligent" at all.
>
> Why can't we applaud the considerable technical achievement as a tool?
>
> Like a back-hoe or locomotive? But just a tool, nothing more.
>
Equating Watson with a locomotive is similar to the computers in movies
reducing humans to "Carbon-based units".
It may be true at some level
but it misses the point.
Watson exhibits a lot of the hallmarks of intelligent. Does it then
qualify as a human being? No.
Would it do a better job at tasks that we think require a lot of
intelligence and judgment? I think so.
Will it be a better diagnostician than the best doctor? Maybe.
Will it make fewer mistakes than the average doctor? Probably.
What parts of the practice of medicine require intelligence and
judgment? Diagnosing difficult medical condition would seem to qualify.
How do you define intelligence?
Are doctors exhibiting intelligence when the diagnose a patient's
problem and recommend a course of treatment?
If a machine is doing the same thing but better, is it not evidence of
intelligence.
If you define intelligent as human-style thinking (which we are still
not sure how that is actually done), you can say machines will never be
intelligent because they lack
biological structures.
I don't think that that has ever been a recognized test for intelligence
in AI but perhaps for the general public who have not given it much
thought, the definition might be acceptable and somehow comforting.
Ron
> Hope you are having a great day!
>
> Patrick
>
> On 2/17/2011 3:16 PM, Obrst, Leo J. wrote:
>> Amen, John! I quite agree with you.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
>> Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 1:37 PM
>> To:
ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] IBM Watson's Final Jeopardy error "explanation"
>>
>> Peter and Krzysztof,
>>
>> PB
>>> "artificial intelligence" is neither.
>> That's a quibble about a name. Many people, including me, have stated
>> such quibbles from time to time, but they're irrelevant. They're as
>> pointless as the behaviorists who objected to the name 'psychology'
>> because it implies an unobservable psyche.
>>
>> John McCarthy coined the term 'artificial intelligence'. He also
>> designed LISP, and he was the primary advocate of logic-based
>> techniques in AI, which spilled over into every other area of
>> computer science. He also published some
papers about philosophical
>> issues in AI, which stimulated much of the R& D that led to our
>> current work on formal ontology.
>>
>> PB
>>> I seriously worry that such a failed dismal experiment of the
>>> last century...
>> The amount of high quality research done under the name of AI
>> has been enormous, and it has been so thoroughly integrated into
>> the foundations of computer science that its AI origins have often
>> been forgotten:
>>
>> 1. Just look at LISP, which contributed the if-then-else statement,
>> recursion, lambda expressions, metalanguage, garbage collection,
>> the ability to write an interpreter or compiler of a language
>> in itself, etc. (McCarthy, by the
way, was also a member of
>> the IFIP committee that designed Algol, so his influence was
>> very direct.)
>>
>> 2. Java is basically LISP + CLOS (Common Lisp Object System)
>> written in a syntax based on C. But the AI community had
>> 30 years of experience in using and extending that technology.
>> Sun (which designed Java) was founded by former Stanford
>> students who learned LISP and AI from McCarthy and others
>> and who built their company by selling workstations for AI.
>>
>> 3. Most of the technology for logic-based systems, theorem provers,
>> formal languages, parsers,
etc., was either pioneered in AI
>> or applied and extended in AI projects.
>>
>> 4. People like Ted Codd, who founded the relational DB community,
>> were strongly influenced by AI. Codd wrote his PhD dissertation
>> on cellular automata and participated in joint projects on AI
>> related issues. Among them was his RENDEZVOUS system for
>> an English query language for RDBs (and, by the way, Codd's
>> group used a parser that I wrote for their front end).
>>
>> PB
>>> [AI] now re-emerges with respectable "semantic web" clothing.
>> Please note that the Semantic Web is just a tiny subset of AI
>> technology, and the primary developers came
from the AI community.
>>
>> The person who developed RDF was Ramanathan Guha, who wrote his
>> PhD dissertation at Stanford with McCarthy as his supervisor.
>> While he was finishing his PhD, he worked on Cyc and became
>> the associate director of Cyc. He later went to Apple, where
>> he developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF). He then went
>> to Netscape, where he worked with Tim Bray to rewrite MCF in
>> XML to form RDF.
>>
>> Guha later collaborated with Pat Hayes and others (also from
>> the AI community) to define the semantic foundations for RDF
>> and OWL. (Just check Google for "Guha Hayes RDF" and
>> "Guha Hayes OWL" to find the W3C documents.) And OWL began
>> as a combination of two AI projects, DAML + OIL, and was
>> further enhanced by people from the AI
community.
>>
>> KJ
>>> Watson is a question answering machine and a very good one. Maybe one
>>> day they will deploy it on your mobile phone with a Internet connection
>>> to the processing and storage unit in the cloud similar to the Wolfram
>>> Alpha App. Watson is not intelligent in the sense that it does not
>>> understand the answers or questions but it turns out that in many cases
>>> this is not necessary. I think that as a research domain we should be
>>> rather happy that Watson won and congratulate IBM -- it is a strong
>>> showcase for our work.
>> I strongly agree. The people who worked on Watson had a strong
>> foundation in both AI and comp. sci. It is a respectable piece
>> of research.
>>
>> Anybody who doubts these points should do some remedial studies
>>
in the history of AI and computer science.
>>
>> John
>>
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