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Artificial Intelligence (AI) - I.
Today is the beginning of talking about artificial intelligence,
it is a very different topic.
I spent much of last night and today thinking about it,
and talking to friends about what they really believe.
After all, there is no point in giving lectures if it
doesn't make the professor think, so I've done a lot of thinking.
Now I'll present material that is somewhat different than it is
in the book, but not too different. The underlying problem -
"can machines think?" - is your personal ego. You know that
machines can calculate faster, more reliably, cheaper, they have
freedom from boredom, there are all kinds of assets that machines have.
But you don't like to feel that you are inferior to machines that you
have built. So one of the major problems is your ego...
Having examined the history of computer applications we are naturally
attracted to an examination of their future limits, not in computing
capacity but rather what kinds of things computers can and perhaps cannot do.
Before we get too far I need to remind you that computers manipulate symbols,
not information; we are simply unable to say, let alone write a program for,
what we mean by the word “information.” We each believe we know what the
word means, but hard thought on your part will convince you that it is a
fuzzy concept at best, that you cannot give a definition that can be
converted into a program.
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