Damon Horowitz, former technologist, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher, and a graduate of Columbia and MIT, talks about the state of AI, why he left that field, and "Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities."
Over time, it became increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the artificial intelligence systems I was building were not actually that intelligent. They could perform well on specific tasks; but they were unable to function when anything changed in their environment. I realized that, while I had set out in AI to build a better thinker, all I had really done was to create a bunch of clever toys—toys that were certainly not up to the task of being our intellectual surrogates.
And it became clear that the limitations of our AI systems would not be eliminated through incremental improvements. We were not, and are not, on the brink of a breakthrough that could produce systems approaching the level of human intelligence. I wanted to better understand what it was about how we were defining intelligence that was leading us astray: What were we failing to understand about the nature of thought in our attempts to build thinking machines?
And, slowly, I realized that the questions I was asking were philosophical questions—about the nature of thought, the structure of language, the grounds of meaning. So if I really hoped to make major progress in AI, the best place to do this wouldn't be another AI lab. If I really wanted to build a better thinker, I should go study philosophy. Thus, about a decade ago, I quit my technology job to get a Ph.D. in philosophy. And that was one of the best decisions I ever made.
More here. Check out my own take on AI in an article I wrote two years ago, The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence.
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