Philosophy professor discusses how it started and where it's headed
"When I'm asked whether computers will ever really mimic humans, I say,
yes and no," says James
Moor, professor of philosophy
and director of AI@50, a
conference this summer at Dartmouth commemorating the golden anniversary of the
field of artificial intelligence. "Yes, neural net computers are being
built that operate somewhat analogously to the brain; and no, humans are
biological creatures with emotions, feelings, and creativity that are unlikely
to be fully captured by machines, at least for the foreseeable
future."
James Moor (Photo by Joseph Mehling '69)
|
The field of AI has its roots at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project
on Artificial Intelligence. In those early days, says Moor, researchers wanted
to make machines more cognizant and to lay out a framework to better understand
human intelligence. Today, according to Moor, these remain goals for AI, but
the field has become more focused on specific aspects of intelligence, such as
learning, reasoning, vision, and action.
Moor's expertise is the philosophy of computing, which explores such
questions as, what kinds of minds can machines have, what does it mean to be
creative or aware, and what kinds of decisions should machines make? These
questions draw out interesting features of human nature, and highlight what it
is that makes humans similar to and different from machines.
He considers the field on two levels. One is the applied computing level
that involves the development of "expert systems," for such areas as
spectrographic analysis, stock market patterns, and medical diagnostics; and
the development of robotic systems for driving cars as well as software for
searching the Internet. The other is the philosophical level that tries to
answer a question such as, what is the nature of intelligence? He thinks that
bridging these two levels is challenging, but very useful in developing a
fuller understanding of minds. Science forces philosophy to be more empirical
and philosophy forces science to be more reflective.
"The initial hope was that AI could do much more than has actually panned
out in 50 years," he says. "Language use and translation by machine,
for example, was once expected to be quite easy. Turns out that language use
requires extensive knowledge of how the world works. This complex knowledge is
usually assumed in ordinary conversation, which is easy for us, but it's
difficult to teach a computer voice inflection, social and cultural
idiosyncrasies, as well as a multitude of social contexts."
At the AI@50 conference, which is open to the public and will be held at
Dartmouth July 13 through 15 (see conference program),
Moor believes there will be considerable debate about the future direction that
AI should take. He says that the plan for the conference is not only to honor
the past and assess present accomplishments, but also to help seed ideas for
future artificial intelligence research.
"AI has come a long way in 50 years, and it has a bright future.
Although computers may never replace us, smart machines will be prevalent in
our environment, and may someday be even implanted in us. The future of
artificial intelligence deserves careful and sustained scrutiny."
By SUSAN KNAPP
|
RSS/XML Feed