Come Walk With Me
Artificial Intelligence has been defined as the study of anything humans do that computers can’t. Once we’ve figured out how to get computers (or robots) to do such a task, it ceases to be AI. Such tasks once included optical character recognition, handwriting recognition, and playing championship Chess. In each case, there were detractors who said that such abilities were purely the province of God’s creation, and pronounced replication of those tasks in mere machines impossible.
When it turned out that machines performing those tasks turned out instead to be inevitable the detractors puffed dismissively, saying that these tasks really weren’t that hard after all, and could be solved in a mechanical fashion. Each time, their God of the gaps shrank just a little bit. The detractors still relish waving at the long line of Sacred Cows, still patiently waiting on Sacred Cow Death Row for their turn to arrive.
Walking the way humans and animals do (by controlled falling and dynamic balancing) has been on the Sacred Cow Death Row for a long time, and looks like it’s about to lose its final appeal for stay of execution.
Boston Dynamics “Big Dog”
Trevor Blackwell’s Anybots
(I had the privilege of riding Trevor’s home-made self-balancing scooter at a conference several years ago.)
Thinking the way we do (or even better) is, of course, the holy grail, and the subject of Artificial General Intelligence. Why should this final Sacred Cow’s day not eventually arrive?
Arimaa, anyone?
