[jd115]

The low-level thing that isn't understood is that intelligence is not progressive. You can not build up to it. Sure, you can forever continue to build better and better approximations of certain aspects of intelligence and pretend you're making progress, but you are not. Of course, there is great utilitarian value in those approximations, so we MUST continue to do this.

Still, my position is that NO progress has ever been made in the area of AI, and no progress will be made any time soon.

I'll take it a step further (in case I don't get enough downvotes for what I've written so far). I maintain that you CAN NOT build intelligence. You can only TAP INTO it. So the very direction in which all of our AI efforts are headed is a dead-end.

[leto_ii]

> I maintain that you CAN NOT build intelligence. You can only TAP INTO it.

I wouldn't go exactly this far, but I would say that whatever process might exist to create artificial intelligence, it might be closer to gardening than to engineering.

My vague feeling is that there might be some sort of (non-supernatural) "mysterious" component to intelligence that we won't be able to engineer and that might just emerge under the right circumstances.

In that case we would just have to "grow" AI, without being completely sure that our effort will work.

[grapescheesee]

I agree. We need to stop this over use, actually the use of AI as some grounded in science matter of fact. What we have is ML, and thus a system for algorithmic refinement and definition.

[rndphs]

I'm sure people said the same thing about motive power before the steam engine. You cannot build it, you can only tap into it.