When is AI no longer AI? When it works
Adobe Advanced Technology Lab researcher Bill McDaniel asks the provocative question, "why is it that when we build AI systems, the ones that work are no longer considered AI?"
This has plagued the AI arena for years. It seems that as soon as we develop a new technique... it is immediately classed as useful algorithms, semantic technology, vision processing, anything but AI....
I suspect some of that is because we do NOT solve these problems with emergent AI, intelligence that both arises out of some "ghostly signature" in our knowledge bases and tta seeks to extend itself. It is, I contend, the very absence of these traits that makes us so reluctant to embrace wht we HAVE accomplished as Intelligence.
In some region of ourselves, we know that what these techiques represent, as amazingly successful as htey are, is Artificial Smarts, not Artificial Intelligence. We sense that Intelligence will be recognizable and will be emergent, not algorithmic in nature. And we won't be happy with AI until we get that.
Is he right? I don't know enough about the state of AI to answer the question, but it's an interesting one.
Technorati Tags: AI
I'd first heard this back in the 80s, before the AI winter. I'd heard that during the 60s, word wrap (how do you avoid widows and orphans? how do you decide to break the way that a human editor would break the line?) and hyphenization (do you hyphenate the word as re-cord or rec-ord? (You need context to decide if it's a noun or verb)) were considered AI topics.
Ultimately, 80% solutions (break on whitespace/punctuation, consistently hyphenate ignoring context on context-sensitive cases) were implemented and noone thinks of those things as AI anymore.
Posted by: Ken | November 15, 2005 at 10:33 PM
Useful piece of historical perspective. So this is not a new complaint... nor are shifts in what constitutes an AI problem new. I wonder how often their redefinition is a function of their being solved (or at least handled well enough to no longer be interesting), versus being overtaken by other technologies (another way of being solved, I guess), versus other things.
Posted by: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang | November 15, 2005 at 10:45 PM
Turns out this is called the AI Effect. The AAAI (located in Menlo Park) has some info on it.
Posted by: Ken | November 25, 2005 at 10:53 PM
yes he is right, because AI is multidisciplinary study and 70% of total field is borrowed e.g. neurology, mechanics, psychology, philosophy, logic, reason,
Infact, AI doesn't have very mature princeples and well docuemnted research area, yet.
it needs more centuries ........!
Fazi
Posted by: Faizan | January 27, 2008 at 08:55 PM