Vint Cerf on the Future of the Internet

Vint Cerf on the Future of the Internet

• I happen to be a computational linguist, among other things, and I disagree with Cerf’s assessment of the present and near-future success of automatic translation — you can’t translate correctly if you can’t think. Computers can’t think, and we won’t know how to make them think for quite some time.
• His assessment of the impact of mobile computing is spot-on, though, and it’s a point that’s often not on the radar in western industrialized countries with hot and cold running PC’s.

Whatever happened to artificial intelligence?

Whatever happened to artificial intelligence?

• So-called “narrow AI” is going to enjoy ever-increasing importance in our future. But it’s the only AI that actually exists, and the only AI that will exist in my lifetime. So the sooner all the funding gets redirected from utopian, cryptoreligious pursuits of “Singularity” and “Transhumanity” back to good, old-fashioned engineering, the sooner we can get on with the noble goal of making easier the lives of a networked humanity.

Survival of the Machines

Survival of the Machines

• If we’re going to have superhuman artificial intelligence before 2030, then why do we still have to have human translators, human paralegals, human bookkeepers and human teachers in 2008? Artificial intelligence is nowhere close to being able to match even mediocre human abilities in those occupations today.
• So I’ll not even ask about human novelists, human lawyers and judges, human tax accountants and human university researchers. Anybody who thinks that artificial intelligence research will surpass the degree of intelligence required for these occupations before 2030 is either (a) a true believer in a religious cult or (b) trying to scam some research grants from the gullible. In the case of (a), they’ll go away when they find a new utopian dream to pursue. In the case of (b), the money would be better spent elsewhere.
• But of course “surpass human intelligence before 2030″ is meaningless anyway because it suffers from terminal vagueness. What kind of intelligence, underlying what kind of abilities? Measured how? Surpass the intelligence of a human with an IQ of 45, or of one with an IQ of 185? Surpass the intelligence of any human?