Extending Minds

Over at Charles Stross' blog is a great post about Singularity theory and the state of AI. The post and the many comments that follow it are a good read for a lazy weekend (which this one isn't for me, but hey).

Artificial Intelligence has long fascinated me and early on when I started programming I remember reading in books that we were "less than 20 years away" from true AI. That was 26 years ago. Since then we have seen amazing progress in nearly all other fields of computer science, but AI has turned into some sort of neo-philosophy where many words are written about the unknowable, but very little active research seems to go on.

It's odd that we seem to be able to create utterly alien concepts like the hive-minds of our networked society (imagine explaining Wikipedia or World of Warcraft to your great-grandfather), but we have still no clear concept of what a recognizable individual intelligent being (I guess that's what we think of when we say AI) actually is. We frankly just don't know what makes that fatty ball of neurons in our head tick.

But I'm sure we are only 20 years away from figuring that out. :)