Artificial intelligence

If you are interested in artificial intelligence and are young enough to want a $2000 scholarship for a brief essay on the subject, go to this website.

I’m always willing to help someone get a scholarship.

My problem is that I don’t believe in artificial intelligence.  Call me a fool.  I’ve  visited the MIT lab several times and interviewed many artificial intelligence gurus.  I’ve spent time at John McCarthy’s Stanford lab too.

The many programs that appear to be artificial intelligence from great chess programs to Siri to voice recognition are in fact just massive, rapidly accessible data bases.

That is clearly the case for the IBM chess program which  is an algorithm that follows a large number of alternate chess move sequences and assigns values to each route.  What appears to be intelligence is probability applied to massive calculations.

Siri and her siblings are large data bases of routing paths based on human analysis.  Humans constantly examine defective routings and make necessary changes.  These resemble incremental increases in intelligence.  They are really the addition of more human effort.

Lastly, the extraordinary ability of machines to listen to human words and parse the sounds into meaningful dialog is the result of brute force.  There are roughly 50,000 English words in common usage (technically, twice as many are used occasionally).  By using a Google English database of more than 1 million words including mispronunciations, dialect variations and phonetic variations, voice programs are good at transferring sound into print.

So where is the artificial intelligence?  Look up AI in wikipedia and see disambiguated hot air.

I see so little of human intelligence around me; I am invariably doubtful about non-human success.