AI: Thankful for Bad AI

Imagine if the first computers man was able to create worked in pretty much the same way the human brain works. Imagine if they were pretty decent at reasoning, and terrible at calculating things quickly without error. Image that instead of having a quest for artificial intelligence, we had a quest for a "really fast, really accurate data cruncher." It'd be a different world. It definitely makes me grateful that we have humans *and* computers, each very useful in their own way.

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Comments

Noah Gift said…

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12:27 PM

Alec said…

JJ, you may be sad to learn we're already heading in that direction: http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/19/daniel-suarez-daemon-bot-mediated-reality/

It was a pretty interesting talk, worth listening to. Gives a whole new meaning to all the little cronjobs and RSS scrapers we've all been hacking on...

http://fora.tv/media/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2008-08-08-suarez.mp3

9:43 AM

jjinux said…

Alec, thanks for the links. It's taken me a week to listen to the talk, but it was worth it :)

10:23 PM

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