The Machine Age

The Machine Age
By PETER NORVIG
Sun., Feb. 13, 2011, 10:40pm

Forty years ago this December, President Nixon declared a war on cancer, pledging a “total national commitment” to conquering the disease. Fifty years ago this spring, President Kennedy declared a space race, promising to land a man safely on the moon before the end of the decade. And 54 years ago, Artificial Intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon declared that “there are now in the world machines that think” and predicted that a computer would be world chess champion within 10 years.

How have these bold efforts fared? We all know that Neil Armstrong made the giant leap for mankind in 1969, on schedule, and by the mid-1970s the sight of astronauts walking and driving on the moon became so routine that people impatiently started switching their TVs back to baseball. But to the layman it seems that efforts in cancer and artificial intelligence have failed; there have been no breakthroughs giving us the cure or the answer.

But the truth is more complex. On the one hand, the Apollo program truly was a spectacular success, but it also marked the end of progress — no human has traveled more than 400 miles away from Earth since 1975. Meanwhile, the war on cancer has made steady progress. In the last 20 years, death rates have decreased 21% in men and 12% in women, due to a combination of better diagnostic screening, reduced smoking and specific treatments for dozens of different cancers, particularly lymphoma, leukemia and testicular cancer. Those hoping for a single “cure” were disappointed because cancer turned out to be not a single problem but a complex arrangement of inter-related problems on which we continue to make incremental progress.

Artificial intelligence turned out to be more like cancer research than a moon shot. We don’t have HAL 9000, C-3PO, Commander Data, or the other androids imagined in the movies, but A.I. technology touches our lives many times every day, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy each year, and is improving steadily. Most of this appears behind the scenes, in applications like these:

* Spam filtering programs using A.I. learning and classification techniques correctly identify over 99.9% of the 200 billion spam e-mails sent each day.

* Your Android smartphone can recognize your speech and transcribe it into words quite accurately, despite your “New Yawk” accent and the honking cabby passing by on the street behind you.

* A.I. chess programs play at the level of top human champions (defeating the world champion 40 years after Simon’s prediction, not 10). IBM’s Watson computer will eagerly take on “Jeopardy!” champs starting tomorrow. In checkers, an A.I. program has achieved perfection — it can play flawlessly and it proved for the first time that checkers always results in a draw if both sides play correctly.

Source: http://www.nypost.com