In Pursuit of Hal

Gammage, Jeff. "In pursuit of Hal." The Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 Jan. 2001.[1]

Staff writer JG on how far computer scientists must go to get true AI. Brings to a popular audience some of the work reported in Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, ed. David Stork (q.v., this Category). What seemed difficult to get a computer to do—e.g., defeat a world-class chess champion—proved easy, and what even young human children do easily—e.g., recognize faces, use "common sense—even the most intelligent computers (so far) find difficult. "It's a field enmeshed in debate, even over how to proceed. Roger Schank, who led the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project, believes HAL will never exist. On the other hand, Raymond Kurzweil, who developed the first text-to-speech synthesizer, thinks man eventually may achieve artificial intelligence by mapping a human brain and then encoding the data into a computer to create a virtual brain." It is now an old debate; search this wiki for "AI" (without quotation marks) and see works cross-listed in this Category under citations for R. Descartes and D. R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach.

RDE, Title, 27Aug19