Gigaom AI Minute – May 21

Transcript

John McCarthy, the man who coined the term "artificial intelligence" wrote in 1958 that, "Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do." Then he goes on to describe what a machine with common sense would be like.

Common sense has proven to actually be the hardest problem in artificial intelligence. For a machine to know the difference between, say, "What's larger the sun or a nickel?" turns out to be a lot harder than teaching it how to play chess.

But I'm really intrigued by the opening part of that quote, "Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do." I'm curious how well it is that humans learn from experience. Is that actually how we gain in knowledge? Machines should, in theory, be able to do that better than us because they can perfectly remember all of their experiences while we remember relatively few.