Did Web Search kill Artificial Intelligence?

The most commonly referenced definition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is probably the Turing Test which avoids the tricky questions like 'what is intelligence' or 'what does it mean to think' and replaces them simply by the test of recognizing an anonymous agent as a fellow human (and, therefore, intelligent).

A key aspect of this is, of course, that the interrogator is communicating with an equal in terms of the mode, pace and structure of dialogue (it is possible that a computer could succeed at this deception but reveal itself by being implausibly smarter than a human, but that is a question we can enjoy a little later).

As we have since learned, creating AIs is extremely hard and requires a very large portion of the smart people coming out of a broad spectrum of disciplines including software engineering, robotics, psychology, cognitive science and linguistics.

Another enabler is industrial context which brings the pragmatics of real world problems, and the scale and funding that is often not available to academics and if so doesn't benefit from stark focus required to make progress that is provided by industry.

However, we currently have the following:

• Search engines that don't understand language and which attempt to mediate between people (searches by people and documents by people),
• The best and the brightest coming to work for document oriented web companies.

I can't help but wonder where the AI project would be today if web search (as it is currently envisioned) hadn't gobbled up so much bandwidth.

Comments

[Nilanp]

I love this post.

Good thinking - we need to see more like it.
Your post helped me realise innovation only happens in one of 2 cases:

a) where this is an economical case to do so: i.e. product / market fit generates values (i.e. costs of making outweighed by value generated)

b) government invests to innovate - really only works well in the military

2 reflections on this:

a) therefore currently with the current web ecosystem of companies we are going to see:

- Loads of social, mobile, connected applications and innovation
- we won't see much AI

b) What else won't we see much of ?

Could any of these other potential innovations be life changing ?

One of the areas I've written about is that of the role of social technology in driving social change in north africa.

twitter and facebook were great tools at amplofying a network of weak links to generate momentum for change - but they had a number of failings too. The market did not create a requirement for developing these features (e.g. anonymous networks, no single points of failure, distributed storage, etc.)

Thoughts ?

[Kdnuggets]

Great point, but I don't think AI research was killed - perhaps slowed down and redirected? Perhaps AI would emerge in a different way from search-oriented efforts with projects like Siri, Watson, Wolfram Alpha?

[Hmason]

Great post!

I usually make this argument about algorithms for ad targeting, but the point is the same -- why have we abandoned the truly ambitious research questions in our field for things that are more immediately practical? Are we at a local maxima? How do we shift more resources to these problems?

(I don't have answers, just questions. :)