A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Work

It seems that after working on a system design for three years plus six months, that we can see what we've been designing. I guess that happens with vision. Sometimes you need look to the side to see what's in front of you. The goal was to build a better computer. But as the computer design became more efficient, more elegant and more complete, the design began to look less like a traditional computer and more like something in nature. Actually it looked like many things in nature. Searches for prior work to resolve logic problems started bringing up bumble bees, ant colonies, and the octopus.

It was as Alan Turing suggested in a lecture [Turing, 1947] long ago, computers can achieve intelligence. But unlike the human level machine intelligence Alan described in a follow-up [Turing, 1950] and pursued by a generation of Artificial Intelligence researchers [McCarthy, 1996], it seems computer intelligence may best be achieved from fundamental concepts and not by modeling humans.

So what's the funny thing that happened on the way to work? It seems that understanding people, and how we think (i.e. modeling humans) gets a whole lot simpler once you understand how intelligent computers think.

Warren

Reference

[Turing, 1947] Turing, A. M. (1947). Lec- ture to the london mathematical society. In The Collected Works of A. M. Tur- ing, volume Mechanical Intelligence. North- Holland. This was apparently the first pub- lic introduction of AI, typescript in the King's College archive, the book is 1992.

[Turing, 1950] Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind.

[McCarthy, 1995] John McCarthy, (1995) FROM HERE TO HUMAN-LEVEL AI, "Many will find dismayingly large the list of tasks that must be accomplished in order to to reach human-level logical intelligence. Perhaps fewer but more powerful ideas would simplify the list. Others will claim that a system that evolves intelligence as life does will be more straightforward to build. Maybe, but the advocates of that approach have been at it as long as we have and still aren't even close." >

I know there are unresolved terms in this entry. Once icopen.org and automapp.com are public (really soon now), I'll create links.