| >> “the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years”, Here's the entire comment: >> In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather god of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns the effort that succeeded. Not only is that a personal attack, it's a completely absurd fabriaction: Chosmky did not work for 60 years on creating chatbots ("machines that can converse in ordinary language"). I see that Aaronson added a comment to his blog to stop people calling him out for that. But the comment doubles down on the absurdity and says that Chomsky is "regarded as the highest authority" by some vaguely defined faction of "anti-statistical" someone or other. Like many people who have only recently heard about AI, Aaronson has heard of things he has only partly-digested, like for example that there are two "camps" in AI, but of course he has a very superficial understanding of what that means. The "old guard" of AI researchers, as he calls them elsewhere in his post were always polymaths with contributions in many fields. Take Claude Shannon for example (oh, you didn't know? Shannon was at Dartmouth and one of the people who invented the name "Artificial Intelligence" for the workshop there). He invented logic gates, and information theory. There is no separation like the one that Aaronson is trying to make, it's only in his head and in the heads of people who treat the whole AI debate as a football game, and just want to be cheerleaders for the home team. And he still hasn't removed that embarrassing attack from his article. Well I hope he goes down as the guy who thought Chomsky worked on chatbots. If that's the hill he really wants to die on... |