06 Hamming, Learning to Learn: Artificial Intelligence (AI) I, 7 April 1995
Channel: Hamming on Hamming: Learning to Learn
Date: 21/02/2018

Today is the beginning of talking about artificial intelligence, it is a very different topic. I spent much of last night and today thinking about it, and talking to friends about what they really believe. After all, there is no point in giving lectures if it doesn't make the professor think, so I've done a lot of thinking. Now I'll present material that is somewhat different than it is in the book, but not too different. The underlying problem - "can machines think?" - is your personal ego. You know that machines can calculate faster, more reliably, cheaper, they have freedom from boredom, there are all kinds of assets that machines have. But you don't like to feel that you are inferior to machines that you have built. So one of the major problems is your ego... Having examined the history of computer applications we are naturally attracted to an examination of their future limits, not in computing capacity but rather what kinds of things computers can and perhaps cannot do. Before we get too far I need to remind you that computers manipulate symbols, not information; we are simply unable to say, let alone write a program for, what we mean by the word “information.” We each believe we know what the word means, but hard thought on your part will convince you that it is a fuzzy concept at best, that you cannot give a definition that can be converted into a program.

#AI
00:00 Introduction 
00:44 The underlying problem in can machines think is your ego 
01:36 The second major difficulty is your religion 
03:24 A chess problem 
04:26 Can you think? 
04:55 Back in Greek times Democracies said… 
05:33 If you want to pick a psycho-physical parallel there is an awkward question… how do they interact? 
06:13 Background; Prep for this lecture 
08:08 Computers thinking 
10:30 When list processing died, expert systems (rule-based logic was born) 
11:58 Example of rule-based logic 
13:05 A doctor is allowed to be human 
13:25 If a program has an error and your relative died, who do you sue 
14:57 Can machines think as a theme for AI 
16:16 Can you write the program so machines can think? 
16:55 The competition between man and machine (and the cooperation) 
17:42 What is a machine? 
18:41 What is thinking? 
20:41 You want to be able to think? 
21:45 If we are different from the living world(souls; how do we differ)  
23:31 Physics traditionally believes you are a collection of molecules… 
24:42 To produce machines that thought (#QuantumMechanics) 
28:03 Tolerance of ambiguity introduction 
29:24 Souls; a little ambiguous  
33:40 We’re at stalemate; I don’t want my life to depend upon a machine 
36:50 Some of the things machines have done 
42:55 Did the machine learn from experience  
44:53 You’ll never understand the problem until you yourself start asking the tough questions 
45:45 If you will not struggle with your own beliefs, you will not get really far 
48:50 End 

* NPS Hamming portal: https://www.nps.edu/hamming
* NPS course site: https://cle.nps.edu/portal/site/hamming