Herbert Roitblat writes:

At least since the 1950s, the idea that it would be possible to soon create a machine that was capable of matching the full scope and level of achievement of human intelligence has been greeted with equal amounts of hype and hysteria. We’ve now succeeded in creating machines that can solve specific fairly narrow problems — “smart” machines that can diagnose disease, drive cars, understand speech, and beat us at chess — but general intelligence remains elusive.

Let’s get this out of the way: Improvements in machine intelligence will not lead to runaway machine-led revolutions. They may change the kind of jobs that people do, but they will not spell the end of human existence. There will be no robo-apocalypse.

The emphasis of intelligence testing and computational approaches to intelligence has been on well-structured and formal problems. That is, problems that have a clear goal and a set number of possible solutions. But we humans are creative, irrational, and inconsistent. Focusing on these well-structured problems may be like looking for your lost keys where the light is brightest. There are other problems that are much more typical of human intelligence and deserve a closer look. [Continue reading…]