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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article (was: Roger Penro
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In article <39eaqk$nn9@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> hpm@cs.cmu.edu writes:
>
>These seem silly in hindsight.  AI critics of 1994 will seem equally
>silly.  A future Matthews (while spleening on some future proposal)
>will note how critics of AI were just not paying attention in school,
>when it was obvious in 1994 that machines could think.

How will you ever show that they're conscious?

Sure, it may seem obvious that they are conscious; but what seems
obvious might still be wrong.

This is very different from space flight, where there are
straightforward empirical tests.

>    Why, by then,
>machines could read written text, understand speech, reason about
>complex subjects, navigate through the world, beat nearly everyone in
>intellectual games, not to mention accomplishing mathematical feats
>impossible for humans.  And they were improving on all fronts at
>break-neck speed--each year some new barrier fell.  And anyway, it was
>obvious by then that intelligent mechanisms were possible, since the
>biologists had shown conclusively that humans themselves were
>mechanisms cobbled together by the trials and errors of Darwinian
>evolution. 

So far as I can tell, the Penrose arguments say nothing against
*artificial* intelligence, only digital computer intelligence.
Even Searle allows that humans are machanisms.  He just thinks
it matter what the mechanism is, not just the externally observable
behavior.

Why such positions excit so much hostility is a mystery to me.
So what if you have to do some quantum machanical stuff rather
than just run programs?  Why is that such a flame-generating
issue?

-- jd
