General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions...
We turn to quantities when we can’t compare the qualities of things.
Eventually, robots will make everything.
There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.
Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children’s thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
Everything is similar if you’re willing to look far out of focus.
In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious.
We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler’s discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park – without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy’s comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we’d have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.
Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.
Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas – of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there’s something wrong with questions like, “What caused the Universe to exist?”