Interesante entrevista a Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minksky responde a algunas preguntas de MIT Technology Review, al hilo del 50 aniversario de la conferencia de Dartmouth, considerada como el nacimiento de la Inteligencia Artificial. Algunas de sus respuestas no sólo se aplican a este campo, sino a todo el sector TIC. Algunas perlas:

"I think people look around to see what field is currently popular, and then waste their lives on that. If it's popular, then to my mind you don't want to work on it. Now, physics is different. There, people say "This popular theory works pretty well, but it doesn't explain this or that -- so I should look at that." But when people write AI papers, they only tell what their program did, and not how it failed or what kinds of problems it couldn't solve. People don't consider the important problem to be the one their system hasn't solved. People have gotten neural networks to recognize that if you are looking for a taxi, for example, you should look for a yellow moving object. But they don't ask how come these networks can't answer other kinds of questions.

...

In the early days, DARPA supported people rather than proposals. There was a lot of progress from starting in 1963; for about ten years the kinds of things I am talking about did flourish. And then in the early 1970s there was a kind of funny accident. Senator Mike Mansfield, quite a liberal, decided that the Department of Defense shouldn't be supporting civilian research. So he was responsible for ARPA becoming DARPA, and straining not to compete with industrial and civilian research. So it became much harder for them to support visionary researchers.

At the same time, the American corporate research community started to disappear in the early 1970s. Bell Labs and RCA and the others essentially disappeared from this sort of activity. And another thing happened: the entrepreneur bug hit. By the 1980s, many people were starting to try to patent things and start startups and make products, and that coincided with the general disappearance of young scientists. People who could have become productive scientists are now going into law and business.

So there's no way to support this research. If you have a good idea, it's hard to get it published because people say "Where's your experiment?" But the trouble with common-sense thinking is that you can't experiment until you have a big common-sense database. There is one called Cyc, started by Doug Lenat in 1985. And we have the Open Mind database, which is publicly available but not very well structured yet. But it's a whole research project just to figure out how to open up the Open Mind database."