I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.Don't tell Him I said this (if you did, He'd probably deny it) but I think, as a species, Mankind is lonely. He has meticulously explored His own backyard (or, perhaps more accurately, His living room). Having solved some of its mysteries and lost interest in the others, He is bored. He looks to the stars for guidance, for companionship – and above all, for competition. Man likes competition. He likes being the underdog. He likes big, epic battles against the odds. (I mean the fun battles – the ones that get made into movies later on. Not the boring sort, like the ones against poverty, disease and hunger.) And so He pulls a big pile of nuts, bolts and wires out of the cupboard, and gets to work. If the stars don't give Him a playmate, He'll build one Himself.
– 2001: A Space Odyssey
That, I think, explains in a nutshell the human fascination for artificial intelligence. Prophets have been saying for decades now that true, human-level AI is just around the corner. Well, 1997 has come and gone; we're still waiting for HAL. We keep hearing about how processors are septupling in power every twelve minutes; what's happening with all our shiny new computing cycles?
Alas; AI is not (yet) a problem that can be solved by throwing more hardware at it. Hardware might be getting faster and cheaper as manufacturers practice, refine and improve their methods, but the field of AI still belongs to the academicians. It's not just a matter of refining existing techniques; there are still significant conceptual hurdles standing between us and HAL.
The biggest hurdle of all, however, is not one of academics, but one of perception. In the context of AI, people still associate intelligence with linguistic ability. Unfortunately, natural language is inherently ambiguous. An ambiguous language cannot be described through concrete rules; it relies too heavily on context. The only way to teach context is by example. Herein lies the problem: you can't get a research grant allowing you to spend two years standing in front of a computer going 'A for Apple, B for Borland'. That's why I think natural language processing will be the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place.
So where are we now? A lot of not-so-glamorous progress has been made in AI over the past few decades. What a lot of people don't realize is that computers can, in fact, be made to reason, as long as the problem is presented in the right format. Machine learning has also been around for a while, and is apparently experiencing a resurgence of sorts with the revival of statistics-based AI.
What do you get when you put reason and learning together in a blender? That's right – intelligence. Those science fiction gurus may not have been so far off the mark after all. HAL may indeed be around the corner – if there is economic justification for him. He probably won't be able to speak, but he will be smart enough to provide some interesting competition.
