Word: ais
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Actually there have long been a few mysterians insisting that the glory of human experience defies scientific dissection. But the current debate is different. The New Mysterians are fundamentally scientific in outlook. They don't begin by doubting the audacious premises of AI. O.K., they say, maybe it is possible--in principle, at least--to build an electronic machine that can do everything a human brain can do. They just think people like Dennett misunderstand the import of such a prospect: rather than bury old puzzles about consciousness, it resurrects them in clearer form than ever...
...What Dennett does, Chalmers says, is skip the "hard" questions and focus on the "easy" questions--and then title his book Consciousness Explained. There is one other "hard" question that Chalmers emphasizes. It--and Dennett's alleged tendency to avoid such questions--is illustrated by something called pandemonium, an AI model that Dennett favors...
...actual construction of a robot like Cog, or of a pandemonium machine, makes the hard questions more vivid. Materialist dismissals of the mind-body problem may seem forceful on paper, but, says McGinn, "you start to see the limits of a concept once it gets realized." With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being realized--and found, by some at least, incapable of explaining certain parts of human experience. Namely, the experience part...
...this view, Cog may indeed have consciousness. So might a pandemonium machine. So might a thermostat. Chalmers thinks it quite possible that AI research may someday generate--may now be generating--new spheres of consciousness unsensed by the rest of us. Strange as it may seem, the prospect that we are creating a new species of sentient life is now being taken seriously in philosophy...
...game, of course, infant-like flailing or knowing about wetness might not sound like much. But programs like CYC and Cog, not chess machines like Deep Blue, currently define the cutting edge of applied artificial intelligence--the 40-year effort to build machines that think. Ten years ago, when AI was as hot as the Internet is today, researchers raced to build programs that showed deep expertise in a narrow field of endeavor--like chess, for example, or medical diagnosis. These days, however, it's the promise of breadth, not depth, that inspires the artificial intelligentsia--and drives the programs...