![]() We know it’s going to come.”Īs always, AI believers can point to near-miracles of contemporary computer technology to support their optimism. “I would say there’s been disillusionment overall,” says David Stork, editor of “Hal’s Legacy,” an anthology of AI articles published last month. A breakaway branch of AI called artificial life even posits that the Internet can serve as a breeding ground for intelligence that will arise via Darwinian evolution.Īnd some still believe “gofai” (good old-fashioned AI), with its focus on logic and representation, just needed time to develop and is on the cusp of important breakthroughs. ![]() Others say metal men are passe, and favor creating “intelligent” software that adapts and evolves in the nether world of cyberspace. He is constructing humanoid robots that can bump into walls and learn from their environment-and predicts a real-life version of Star Trek’s android Cmdr. As the Champaign-Urbana stamp club prepares to honor Hal’s birth with a commemorative envelope and celebrations of the thinking computer are planned at the University of Illinois and elsewhere, AI visions, shaped by past mistakes and future technologies, are taking on new forms.īrooks, a leader in one strand of the new AI, believes the effort to build computer brains with no bodies was the fatal error. Still, the quest to sire synthetic consciousness has by no means been abandoned. You didn’t say things in polite society anymore about building robots with human-level intelligence.” “The big dream of creating a Hal failed,” says Rodney Brooks of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. AI companies, buoyed by cash injections from Wall Street in the early 1980s, quickly crashed and burned when their technology proved too “brittle” to function in the real world.Īnd the one scientist still trying to develop a Hal-like entity is considered an eccentric by many of his colleagues-even as they privately cheer him on.Įven AI’s greatest triumph of recent years, last summer’s victory by IBM’s “Deep Blue” computer over world chess champion Gary Kasparov, was the result of “brute force” number-crunching, its creators admit, not independent thought. The smartest computers to date can’t tell the difference between a cat and a dog, much less carry on a conversation. “I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight.”īut with Hal’s birthday coming this month, space scientists are about as close to discovering alien intelligence as computer scientists are to creating anything that resembles our own. “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being,” Marvin Minsky, one of the field’s early pioneers, told Life magazine in 1970.
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