Whatever happened to Artificial Intelligence?

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I hate those multi-page ad-pushers (even with adblock - the clicking requirement is just annoying). It would be nice if submitters would check whether there's a one-page option available, and use that link if it is.

What happened to AI depends on who you ask. If it's Peter Norvig during his recent startup school talk <http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/peter-norvig-at-start... > he pointed out advances in image recognition, language translation and driverless cars as examples that AI research is already succeeding. "Now if you only define success as 'Can we duplicate a human?' - well, maybe that's a harder goal. On the other hand, I've done that, too - I have two kids, and they're pretty smart."

If you ask Kevin Warwick, a.k.a. Captain Cyborg, who hosts this year's Loebner Prize Contest at Reading University, a machine might pass the Turing test a little more than four months from now: "I believe machines are getting extremely close - it would be tremendously exciting if such a world first occurred in the UK, in Reading University in 2008. This is a real possibility." Yes, he really said that <http://www.reading.ac.uk/research/Highlights-News/featuresne... >.

Then there are the Artificial General Intelligence guys, like Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Pei Wang. Roughly, they claim we're getting there, agree that everybody else is doing it wrong, but can't agree on which of them is doing it right. But wait, even Doug Lenat is still in the game; go watch his Google presentation <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068... >.

And then there are those who think that AI is a medium ("Expressive AI"), and that the most interesting applications are in videogames like "Spore" and interactive dramas like "Facade". That's what interests me most, personally. Well, I keep track on all the other stuff, too, but I see that also from the AI-as-medium angle, not from a the-singularity-is-coming angle.

Oh yea, and then the article quotes a "futurist" called Daniel Burros: "The first application of successful AI was in the financial services industry for loan qualifications. Loan qualification went from one to two weeks down to minutes." A qualification that struck me as kinda subprime, I must say.