The World in 2030

The World in 2030 75
of the continuing research into what was once called ‘artificial
intelligence’. Software systems now run and control (with
human oversight) jets in flight, air traffic control systems,
human surgery and military weapons systems. These AI
systems are robust and extremely useful and our modern
world couldn’t run without them.
Professor Marvin Minsky 141 of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Boston, USA, is widely regarded
as the ‘father of artificial intelligence’. Speaking to Discover
magazine in 2007 he explained:
The history of AI is sort of funny because the first
real accomplishments were beautiful things, like a
machine that could do proofs in logic or do well
in a calculus course. But then we started to try to
make machines that could answer questions about
the simple kinds of stories that are in a first-grade
reader book. There’s no machine today that can do
that. So AI researchers looked primarily at problems
that people called hard, like playing chess, but they
didn’t get very far on problems people found easy.
It’s a sort of backwards evolution. I expect with our
commonsense reasoning systems we’ll start to make
progress pretty soon if we can get funding for it. One
problem is people are very skeptical about this kind
of work. 142
Asked about his latest 2007 book ‘The Emotion Machine’
Minsky went on to describe the sort of artificial intelligence
machine he would like to build today: