To be fair, people expected a chess playing computer to play chess in the same way a human does, thinking about the board abstractly and learning from experience and all that. We still haven’t accomplished that. Chess programs work by inefficiently computing every possible move, so many moves ahead, which seemed impossible before computers got exponentially faster. And even then, deep blue was a specialized super-computer and had to use a bunch of little tricks and optimizations to get it just barely past human grand master level.
I was going to point that out too as I think it demonstrates an important lesson. They were still wrong.
Almost all of their thought processes were correct, but they still got to the wrong result because they looked at solutions too narrowly. It’s quite possible that many of the objections to AI, rejuvenation, cryonics, are correct but if there’s another path they’re not considering, we could still end up with the same result. Just like a Chess program doesn’t think like a human, but can still beat one and an airplane doesn’t fly like a bird, but can still fly.
To be fair, people expected a chess playing computer to play chess in the same way a human does, thinking about the board abstractly and learning from experience and all that. We still haven’t accomplished that. Chess programs work by inefficiently computing every possible move, so many moves ahead, which seemed impossible before computers got exponentially faster. And even then, deep blue was a specialized super-computer and had to use a bunch of little tricks and optimizations to get it just barely past human grand master level.
I was going to point that out too as I think it demonstrates an important lesson. They were still wrong.
Almost all of their thought processes were correct, but they still got to the wrong result because they looked at solutions too narrowly. It’s quite possible that many of the objections to AI, rejuvenation, cryonics, are correct but if there’s another path they’re not considering, we could still end up with the same result. Just like a Chess program doesn’t think like a human, but can still beat one and an airplane doesn’t fly like a bird, but can still fly.