In recent weeks I've been forced to reformulate and distill my views on AI. After my winter post went viral many people contacted me over email and on twitter with many good suggestions. Since there is now more attention to what I have to offer,  I decided to write down in a condensed form what I think is wrong with our approach to AI and what could we fix. Here are my 10 points:

1. We are trapped by Turing's definition of intelligence. In his famous formulation Turing confined intelligence as a solution to a verbal game played against humans. This in particular sets intelligence as a (1) solution to a game, and (2) puts human in the judgement position. This definition is extremely deceptive and has not served the field well. Dogs, monkeys, elephants and even rodents are very intelligent creatures but are not verbal and hence would fail the Turing test.
2. The central problem of AI is Moravec's Paradox. It is vastly more stark today than it was when it was originally formulated in 1988 and the fact we've done so little to address it over those 30 years is embarrassing. The central thesis of the paradox is

… Read more...

My previous post on AI winter went viral almost to the point of killing my Amazon instance (it got well north of 100k views). It triggered a serious tweet storms, lots of discussion on hackernews and reddit. From this empirical evidence one thing is clear - whether the AI winter is close or not, it is a very sensitive and provocative subject. Almost as if many people felt something under their skin...

Anyway, in this quick followup post, I'd like to respond to some of the points and explain some misunderstandings.

Hype is not fading, it is cracking.

First off, many citations to my post were put in context that the AI hype is fading. This was not my point at all. The hype is doing very well. Some of the major propagandists have gone quieter but much like I explained in the post, on the surface everything is still nice and colorful. You have to look below the propaganda to see the cracks. It would actually be great if the hype faded down but that is not how it works. When the stock market crashes, it is not like everybody slowly begin to admit that they overpaid for … Read more...