Noam Chomsky, famed linguist and political activist, sat down with The Atlantic for a long discussion on Artificial Intelligence. Here’s just a bit, but you should read the entire interview:
[The Atlantic’s Yarden Katz:] I want to start with a very basic question. At the beginning of AI, people were extremely optimistic about the field’s progress, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Why has it been so difficult? If you ask neuroscientists why understanding the brain is so difficult, they give you very intellectually unsatisfying answers, like that the brain has billions of cells, and we can’t record from all of them, and so on.
Chomsky: There’s something to that. If you take a look at the progress of science, the sciences are kind of a continuum, but they’re broken up into fields. The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say physics — greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.
There are select videos from the interview here.
(h/t io9)
