Thinking Allowed: Dr John McCarthy and Jeffrey Mishlove
Due to a chronic YouTube addiction, I recently discovered this goldmine from the past: a BBC Radio show cleverly titled ”Thinking Allowed” with Jeffrey Mishlove (the host).
Let’s talk about the Dr John McCarthy interview:
You know the doctor—creator of LISP, and one of the inventors of the field of artificial intelligence. Cool guy. Looks like you’d imagine. I like that.
Something that’ll strike you about this interview is that conversations about artificial intelligence get so axiomatic when LLMs haven’t been invented in your time. I also like that. Makes you realize how truly young the field is.
Here’s my favorite quote from Dr John McCarthy: “What I believe is if it takes 200 years to achieve artificial intelligence, and there’s a textbook that explains how it’s done...the hardest part of that textbook to write would be the part that explains why people didn’t think of it 200 years ago. Because we’re really talking about how to make machines do things that are really on the surface of our minds. It’s just that our ability to observe our mental processes is not very good, and has not been very good.”
More: “we can look at that historically: Leibniz, who is an extremely smart scientist: co-inventor of calculus with Isaac Newton. He wanted to make a logical calculus that would permit calculation instead of argument, and he invented binary numbers. Yet, he didn’t invent propositional calculus. That was invented by Boole 150 years later.
Then Boole didn’t invent Predicate Calculus so what one sees is that each step in understanding of thought processes has taken time”
And Jeffrey Mishlove remarks in the end: “so, ultimately, the project that you and your colleagues in the field of artificial intelligence are engaged—one might view it as the most noble project of all. The one the Socrates urged people, to ‘know thyself’. And, sometimes against great odds to do what may be one of the most difficult tasks facing human kind”.
And McCarthy says, straight-faced: “well, it’s certainly a difficult task”.
HAHAHA.
Happy New Year, gang.
I’m doing some housekeeping through the year to tighten what this blog is about. To my dismay it started to becoming a dumping ground for whatever I was thinking. Fixing immediately.
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