The Society of Mind 30+ years later
I found a copy of the Society of Mind by Minsky here
AI has not gone this way since. Faster computation and better algorithms have each contributed about the same improvement. Better bigger datasets have also been a huge deal.
The big AI breakthroughs Deep Blue, Watson, AlphaGo, Alphafold*, self driving cars, image recognition have not come from either agents or encoding human expertise into algorithms. But from better data and faster processing.
The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton is good on how improving datasets, algorithms and hardware has improved AI http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
In The book of Why Pearl talks about the scruffies versus the neats and why the scruffies that just get things to work are in the ascendant at the moment. I am probably being unfair to Minsky here as I read his book 20 years ago. But I read it as more about finding underlying principles of cognition that we would put into use. And I do not see many cases where we have.
But how much of Minsky’s vision has happened? And will more happen in future?
*This is arguable as there was a good amount of NLP in the original Watson. Or that the Alphas are doing similar hierarchical reasoning to what Minsky talked about.
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