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November 07, 2006
Brain Dead
Marvin Minsky appears to discourage us from developing systems for artificial intelligence or more simple systems for sensing of human activity. It's a shock coming from one of the founders of MIT's Media Lab. But I've learned that he's called the field of AI that he helped to pioneer "brain dead". So he's cynical (realistic?) and also has a sense of humor. Apparently, he hasn't given up yet.
Minsky points out the complexity of human thinking and sensory mechanisms, showing a simplified structure of society that is far more complex that what the average programmer or engineer can teach a robot. He points out that while it is very easy to teach a machine how to recognize the color red, it's nearly impossible to teach it the plethora of meanings that or any particular color has in different contexts.
Strange. Minsky actually built the first Artifical Neural Network simulator in the early 1950s, well before writing "Society of Mind". Neural networks are system that mimic the connections in the human brain. They could be fed information, gather and organize it, and make sense of the multiple meanings and relationships of the color red or any other topic for that matter. Perhaps he saw views his invention as a flop.
Minsky also encourages us to build machines that have multiple-sensing capabilities - be they depth or color or perspective - that can make better sense of the world than a single touch or distance sensor. Good consideration for future PComp projects ... or even our Spatial Design final. A two-dimentional video sensor just doesn't show enough information to figure out the size and distance of an object, but two cameras pointed in slightly different directions (like the human eyes) would.
Personally, I have little interest in building multi-sensory machines that mimic human intelligence. I'm perfectly content with making specialized mechanisms (machines or software) that perform specific tasks and do them well.
Posted by Jeremy Rotsztain at November 7, 2006 11:52 PM