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November 09, 2006
Minsky
Really interested in the Minsky article. I actually own the book at home but I am ashamed to say I've never bothered to read it. This reading reminded me of the sort of things I studied as an undergraduate. I was interested in how the mind works. The frustrating thing is that the deeper problems of understanding cognition don't have any easy solutions. I liked the quote from Samuel Johnson regarding the problem of defining a word like "bitterness." The dictionary winds up being circular because although everyone knows what "bitter" is it can't really be explained.
I'm fascinated by the way the brain creates a mirror universe of the outside world, and that which we can't perceive with our senses.
I'm surprised to read that Minsky called AI "brain dead." Since the invention of computers brain researchers have been using computers as the latest metaphor to help understand how the brain works. But it's interesting to look at the differences between the brain and computers, and what sorts of things each is good or bad at.
The Wired article is too short for me to really get a sense of Minsky's feelings about AI. Maybe computers are just autistic. In any case, it's difficult to get computers to do certain things humans can do, but it can be very informative. But part of me says we shouldn't try to force computers to do things they aren't good at! Computer intelligence is good for some things and human intelligence is good for others, and it would be far more productive to create better human-computer interfaces.
Posted by Andrew Doro at November 9, 2006 12:51 AM