Submitted by Anonymous Coward (not verified) on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 17:42.
It's funny how the article only talks about people who are at the fringe of the field, not at the leading edge. Kurzweil, Goertzel, Hawkins, and Makram (to a lesser extent) have ZERO credibility in the machine learning/AI/Computational neuroscience communities. Why do journalists never interview the reputable scientists that actually push the envelope, instead of just reinventing the wheel (Hawkins), making unsupported futuristic claims (Kurzweil), pontificating about general AI (Goertzel). All of these people have a commercial incentive.
Why not interview the serious AI/machine learning/computational neuroscience people who actually produce new methods with measurable results. What about interviewing Geoffrey Hinton, Terry Sejnowski, Rich Sutton, Sebastian Seung, Yann LeCun, Tommy Poggio, Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio? They make the field progress quietly. They don't just re-invent the wheel or present other people's ideas as their own. They don't make wild claims about the singularity or the fact that AI will happen "real soon now". They are in the trenches making it happen.
People have been building neural net hardware for at least 20 years (there was work at Bell Labs and Intel in the late 80's), but not much came out of it. Why? because mainstream hardware progresses so fast that the performance advantage of specialized hardware always gets overtaken in a few years by Moore's Law. Also, to build an artificial brain that actually does something useful, you need a good learning algorithm. The current learning algorithms work pretty well, but not as well as what the brain uses. The hardware mentioned in the article does not even support learning. What's the point of simulating 10 zillion neurons if you can't get them to do something useful?
The problem is that serious scientists don't tend to make the wild claims that fringe researchers, startup CEOs, publicity whores, and crackpots are willing to make. Hence they don't get the attention of the press. All the hype is damaging to the field: it creates false expectations from government, industry, and the public. It is such hype that lead to the multiple crashes of "AI" over the last 50 years.
It's funny how the article only talks about people who are at the fringe of the field, not at the leading edge. Kurzweil, Goertzel, Hawkins, and Makram (to a lesser extent) have ZERO credibility in the machine learning/AI/Computational neuroscience communities. Why do journalists never interview the reputable scientists that actually push the envelope, instead of just reinventing the wheel (Hawkins), making unsupported futuristic claims (Kurzweil), pontificating about general AI (Goertzel). All of these people have a commercial incentive.
Why not interview the serious AI/machine learning/computational neuroscience people who actually produce new methods with measurable results. What about interviewing Geoffrey Hinton, Terry Sejnowski, Rich Sutton, Sebastian Seung, Yann LeCun, Tommy Poggio, Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio? They make the field progress quietly. They don't just re-invent the wheel or present other people's ideas as their own. They don't make wild claims about the singularity or the fact that AI will happen "real soon now". They are in the trenches making it happen.
People have been building neural net hardware for at least 20 years (there was work at Bell Labs and Intel in the late 80's), but not much came out of it. Why? because mainstream hardware progresses so fast that the performance advantage of specialized hardware always gets overtaken in a few years by Moore's Law. Also, to build an artificial brain that actually does something useful, you need a good learning algorithm. The current learning algorithms work pretty well, but not as well as what the brain uses. The hardware mentioned in the article does not even support learning. What's the point of simulating 10 zillion neurons if you can't get them to do something useful?
The problem is that serious scientists don't tend to make the wild claims that fringe researchers, startup CEOs, publicity whores, and crackpots are willing to make. Hence they don't get the attention of the press. All the hype is damaging to the field: it creates false expectations from government, industry, and the public. It is such hype that lead to the multiple crashes of "AI" over the last 50 years.