Originally shared by Ward Plunet
Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs
Until a few years ago, mainstream AI researchers assumed that to create intelligence, we just had to imbue a machine with the right logic. Write enough rules and eventually we’d create a system sophisticated enough to understand the world. They largely ignored, even vilified, early proponents of machine learning, who argued in favor of plying machines with data until they reached their own conclusions. For years computers weren’t powerful enough to really prove the merits of either approach, so the argument became a philosophical one. “Most of these debates were based on fixed beliefs about how the world had to be organized and how the brain worked,” says Sebastian Thrun, the former Stanford AI professor who created Google’s self-driving car. “Neural nets had no symbols or rules, just numbers. That alienated a lot of people.”