Linked by the indefatigable people at O’Reilly, I came across a Q&A with Judah Pearl, an AI pioneer, who has some measured criticism of the enterprise as it stands:
Hartnett: People are excited about the possibilities for AI. You’re not?
Pearl: As much as I look into what’s being done with deep learning, I see they’re all stuck there on the level of associations. Curve fitting. That sounds like sacrilege, to say that all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just fitting a curve to data. From the point of view of the mathematical hierarchy, no matter how skillfully you manipulate the data and what you read into the data when you manipulate it, it’s still a curve-fitting exercise, albeit complex and nontrivial.
Hartnett: The way you talk about curve fitting, it sounds like you’re not very impressed with machine learning.
Pearl: No, I’m very impressed, because we did not expect that so many problems could be solved by pure curve fitting. It turns out they can. But I’m asking about the future—what next? Can you have a robot scientist that would plan an experiment and find new answers to pending scientific questions? That’s the next step. We also want to conduct some communication with a machine that is meaningful, and meaningful means matching our intuition. If you deprive the robot of your intuition about cause and effect, you’re never going to communicate meaningfully. Robots could not say “I should have done better,” as you and I do. And we thus lose an important channel of communication.
So maybe it’s not all curve fitting and optimization problems? Seems plausible, but the already formidable mathematics would seemingly get nearly impossible.
Still an interesting read.
A Few Reasonable Words 