Posts tagged AI
Posts tagged AI
The “understand-the-brain” jigsaw puzzle is particularly daunting. Lacking a good framework for understanding intelligence, scientists have been forced to stick with the bottom-up approach. But the task is Herculean, if not impossible, with a puzzle as complex as the brain. To get a sense of the difficulty, imagine a jigsaw puzzle with several thousand pieces. Many of the pieces can be interpreted multiple ways, as if each had an image on both sides but only one of them is the right one. All the pieces are poorly shaped so you can’t be certain if two pieces fit together or not. Many of them will not be used in the ultimate solution, but you don’t know which ones or how many. Every month new pieces arrive in the mail. Some of these new pieces replace older ones, as if the puzzle maker was saying “I know you’ve been working with these old puzzle pieces for a few years, but they turned out to be wrong. Sorry. Use these new ones instead until further notice.” Unfortunately, you have no idea what the end result will look like; worse, you may have some ideas, but they are wrong.
Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out other goals that have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner: once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and becomes instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.
