My old prof was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, obviously. But only slightly: He’d been active in the field since back when it looked like Lisp machines were poised to take over the world, neural nets looked like they’d never amount to much, and all we’d need to get to real thinking machines was hiring lots of philosophers to write symbolic logic descriptions of common-sense tasks. He’d seen exciting AI turn into boring algorithms many, many times - and many more “almost there now!” approaches that turned out to lead to nowhere in particular.
He retired years ago, but I know he still keeps himself updated. I should write him a mail and ask if he has any thoughts about what’s currently going on in the field.
My old prof was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, obviously. But only slightly: He’d been active in the field since back when it looked like Lisp machines were poised to take over the world, neural nets looked like they’d never amount to much, and all we’d need to get to real thinking machines was hiring lots of philosophers to write symbolic logic descriptions of common-sense tasks. He’d seen exciting AI turn into boring algorithms many, many times - and many more “almost there now!” approaches that turned out to lead to nowhere in particular.
He retired years ago, but I know he still keeps himself updated. I should write him a mail and ask if he has any thoughts about what’s currently going on in the field.