As for intermediate milestones, I think all the progress that has been made in AI (and neuroscience!) for the last half-century should count. We now know a whole lot more about AI and brains than we used to.
EDIT: To be more specific, I think such feats as beating humans at chess and Jeopardy! or being able to passably translate texts and drive cars are significant.
Future milestones might include:
beating the Go world champion
significantly better machine translations
much more efficient theorem provers
strong general game players
I could see all of those happening without being able to replicate all human-generated mathematical proofs. But it would still seem like significant progress has been made.
I agree that there exist intermediate milestone. The question is how far the ones that have been surpassed are from the end goal. The relevant thing isn’t how much we understand relative to what we used to know, but how much we understand relative to what’s necessary to build a general artificial intelligence. The latter can be small even if the former is large.
As for intermediate milestones, I think all the progress that has been made in AI (and neuroscience!) for the last half-century should count. We now know a whole lot more about AI and brains than we used to.
EDIT: To be more specific, I think such feats as beating humans at chess and Jeopardy! or being able to passably translate texts and drive cars are significant.
Future milestones might include:
beating the Go world champion
significantly better machine translations
much more efficient theorem provers
strong general game players
I could see all of those happening without being able to replicate all human-generated mathematical proofs. But it would still seem like significant progress has been made.
I agree that there exist intermediate milestone. The question is how far the ones that have been surpassed are from the end goal. The relevant thing isn’t how much we understand relative to what we used to know, but how much we understand relative to what’s necessary to build a general artificial intelligence. The latter can be small even if the former is large.
That’s fair.