Word: ais
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lesson here--now dogma among researchers in artificial intelligence, or AI--is that the hardest thing for computers is the "simple" stuff. Sure they can play great chess, a game of mechanical rules and finite options. But making small talk--or, indeed, playing Trivial Pursuit--is another matter. So too with recognizing a face or recognizing a joke. As Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology likes to say, the biggest challenge is giving machines common sense. To pass the Turing test, you need some of that...
Further, much of the progress made lately on the difficult "simple" problems--like recognizing faces--has come via parallel computers, which mirror the diffuse data-processing architecture of the brain. Though progress in AI hasn't matched the high hopes of its founders, the field is making computers more like us, not just in what they do but in how they do it--more like us on the inside...
...years AI researchers have tossed around the question of whether computers might be sentient. But since they often did so in casual late-night conversations, and sometimes in an altered state of consciousness, their speculations weren't hailed as major contributions to Western thought. However, as computers keep evolving, more philosophers are taking the issue of computer consciousness seriously. And some of them--such as Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz--are using it to argue that consciousness is a deeper puzzle than many philosophers have realized...
Ryle's book was published three years after ENIAC's birth, and at first glance his ideas would seem to draw strength from the computer age. That, at any rate, is the line Dennett takes in defending his teacher's school of thought. Dennett notes that AI is progressing, creating smart machines that process data somewhat the way human beings do. As this trend continues, he believes, it will become clearer that we're all machines, that Ryle's strict materialism was basically on target, that the mind-body problem is in principle solved. The title of Dennett...
...conquest, though, doesn't mean the question is settled by any means. Conservatives have plenty of ideas about how the tide could swing back to a more biblical interpretation. Experts like Abraham Malamat, a biblical historian at the Hebrew University, suggest that no evidence exists of destruction at Ai, for example, because the city was in a different location 3,000 years ago. Bryant Wood, director of the pro-Bible Associates for Biblical Research, insists that his own research supports Joshua's assault on Jericho. Perhaps, he suggests, Kathleen Kenyon was biased, or just got it wrong...