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Consortium on Cognitive Science Instruction

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Kurzweil at it again!

February 17th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Ray Kruzweil has predicted ‘human-level’ AI by 2029. The BBC article is here:

Machines ‘to match man by 2029′

I’m not an AI skeptic - I wouldn’t be in this specialization if I were - but I get really sick of these predictions. My father tells a (possibly) apocryphal story of sitting in Marvin Minsky’s course back in 1955 (or so). Minsky gets up, hammers his first on the podium, and announces “we’ll have artificially intelligent machines within 5 years!” Sometime in the middle 80’s, Minsky was interviewed by Parade magazine (or some other such tabloid) and he was quoted as saying “we’ll have artificially intelligent machines within 5 years!” While I understand the need for popular outreach (I’ve written for Philosophy and the Grateful Dead, for goodness sakes) for both pedagogy and funding, I wish that our ’spokespeople’ would be more careful.

Tags: Teachable moments · Rants & Reflections · CogSci in the press

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