[HN Gopher] Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the...
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Memories: Artificial Intelligence at Stanford in the 70s
Author : furcyd
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-01-11 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lawrencecpaulson.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (lawrencecpaulson.github.io)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| From the Shameless Self-Promotion Dep't:
|
| My book https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future has a
| chapter set in 1979 or so, at the Dutch Goose, where AI Winter
| 1.0 is fully underway:
|
| ===== So, Grant brought up one more thing before they left the
| topic of work. "What do you guys think about artificial
| intelligence? Is that ever going to go anywhere?"
|
| Porter chuckled, "There's a paper from a few years back called
| 'Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity.' You might want
| to read that." The other guys laughed.
|
| Patrick announced, "I'll never forget his opening line, 'As a
| field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of
| respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery.'"
|
| Porter sat back with a wide grin, "I think they crossed that
| border several years ago. That's why they can't get any more
| funding."
|
| Ray said, "Hey, the big breakthrough is only 10 years away. And
| always will be!"
|
| Grant had the strong impression from their approving looks that
| they weren't impressed with AI. He wasn't ready to give up quite
| yet, "Didn't they do some cool stuff, like Blocks World? I loved
| how you could say 'pick up a big red block,' and it did it."
|
| Ray interrupted, "Winograd's around all the time. You could talk
| to him."
| gumby wrote:
| MIT's PDP-10 OS, ITS, was unrelated to TOPS-10 and in fact
| predated it (it was the first OS on the PDP-6). AFAIK, SAIL's
| PDP-10 OS, WAITS, was also written from scratch, as it started on
| the '6 as well. I DOUBT DEC every provided a PDP-6 OS anyway as
| it was a research machine manufactured in small volume mainly
| designed for LISP.
|
| ITS's name, Incompatible Timeshare System, came from a prior MIT
| OS, CTSS ("Compatible Time Sharing System"). I never learned what
| it might have been compatible with as it was long gone by the
| time I showed up at MIT.
|
| WAITS supposedly got its name as a joke on ITS, but you'd have to
| ask Les Earnest for the real story.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Early robots were put through their paces._
|
| Including, if the rumours are to believed, early exercises in
| teledildonics.
|
| (search engines are not confirming at the moment; it would've
| been late-60's early-70's and the way I heard the story, the
| geeks at SAIL were shocked --but not that shocked-- to discover
| that two coeds who answered an ad seeking "open minded
| individuals" turned out to be even freer of hangups than had been
| hoped... Or have my aging neurons misattributed these antics from
| a different AI lab?)
| p_l wrote:
| The "farewell address" from the WAITS machine included a
| reference to the event.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| WAITS has the true details; good to see my memory was not any
| more unreliable than usual.
|
| > _The first character alphabet that was programmed for my
| plotter was Elvish rather than Latin._
|
| To be fair, tengwar is so much more regular than latin, that
| it only stands to reason one might wish to debug with it,
| parametrically* generating letterforms, before committing the
| effort to digitising a full latin alphabet, letter by
| painstaking letter.
|
| (in our days of cheap bandwidth, it's even easier to download
| preexisting alphabets; eg
| https://emergent.unpythonic.net/software/hershey )
|
| * cf https://i.imgflip.com/7757j9.jpg
| aliqot wrote:
| Before I look, do I want this in my search history?
| dark-star wrote:
| ...and then came the first AI winter. Which will certainly happen
| again, this time, only a few years later ;-)
| clementneo wrote:
| Why do you think there'll be an AI winter? And in what form --
| stagnation of neural-network based technologies, a change in
| the overall paradigm of learning-from-data, or something else
| altogether?
| consumer451 wrote:
| The next AI winter will be caused by very needy physical
| robots walking around the world acting like little kids,
| trying to train their models.
|
| They will ask "what are you doing?" and then the dreaded
| "why?" about everything. They will annoy the crap out of
| everyone to the point where we just pack the whole thing up
| for twenty years.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| "Why?" To which any Animaniacs fan will respond, "OK, love
| you, bye-bye!".
| yourapostasy wrote:
| I'm hoping the current crop of ML/AI yields sufficiently
| commercially viable blindsight behavior [1] to fund continuing
| research into AGI. Generative LLM seems sufficiently
| sophisticated to write ad copy and general political speech of
| all kinds, so if that's the direction we go I can see all kinds
| of interesting possible implications. I'd like to see baking in
| positive optimism and collaboration into the DNA of solutions
| delivered by such blindsight systems.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Major...
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(page generated 2023-01-11 23:01 UTC)