Artificial Intelligence is still the future

John McCarthy is an optimist. Yet the field McCarthy is most commonly associated with, artificial intelligence, has made little progress since 1956, when he convened the first Dartmouth conference.

"I've been working on logical AI since 1958," he says, "and I've done some I think good work (and other people also), but still we don't have human-level intelligence yet. I can't predict any definite date at which it will be achieved, even though Ray Kurzweil is eager to say it will happen by 2029. If I live to be 102 and am still capable of laughing I expect to laugh at him then."

He sees no evidence, either, for that science fiction staple the Singularity. Even so, he remains optimistic. He points to genetics as an example. Mendel laid the foundations in 1865, but the genetic code wasn't cracked until the 1960s, And even now, "Still we don't know how genetics controls the shape of an animal. So that's taken even longer than I have so far. Hard scientific problems are hard."

Read full story at The Inquirer.