Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyidsinga | Hacker News Reader

As a person that works in software development and trying to make sense of data - I found the article pretty interesting after the paragraph below. The discussion around science, engineering and adjacencies are good to keep in mind.

> AI researchers often say they are doing engineering. This can sound defensive, when you point out that they aren’t doing science: “Yeah, well, I’m just doing engineering, making this widget work better.” It can also sound derisive, when you suggest that philosophical considerations are relevant: “I’m doing real work, so that airy-fairy stuff is irrelevant. As an engineer, I think metaphysics is b.s.”

View on HN

Well, one interesting thing about the article is the way it describes GOFAI as based on false ideas, which is harsh but fair. But in a lot of ways, GOFAI was "applied philosophy", at least something of a direct map of one form of rationalist philosophy to computation.

GOFAI was abandoned but the various perspectives remain and current AI goes forward without necessarily having any larger perspective at all, just "make it work". One might guess we're waiting for a different coherent philosophy to organize the process.

> GOFAI was abandoned

GOFAI, as a 10ish year era of easy money for CS research agendas, was a relatively cheap investment and ultimately a tremendous financial, economic, and scientific success. If you're using functional languages, sql databases, or networked computers then you're benefitting from GOFAI. ATM you're using all three.

GOFAI was around for a lot longer than 10 years - it arguably started at the Dartmouth workshop and was still going strong in the '90s - so at least 40 years.

but the easy money didn't persist that entire time. Maybe 20 in total, max. more like 10 most places.

point is, most people funded by gofai money weren't doing agi. they were building pls, dbs, networks, etc.

That wasn't my experience - few people were really doing AGI (though some were, even up to the early 90s) but most effort in any area that was explicitly identified as AI was generally in applications (e.g. fault diagnosis and qualitative modelling - the areas I worked in).

Any engineer that thinks metaphysics is “b.s.” is uneducated in the schools of thought that made engineering of any sort possible in the first place.

yep -- sadly, I've heard that sentiment over and over.

edit: I should clarify - I've heard that sentiment a lot, but now that I think of it, the "it's BS" part usually comes from a place of frustration due to time constraint.

..which leads to this article about why software is late: https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep...

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com