Mind as Machine

[sawyl]

Todays Sunday Feature on Radio 3, entitled Mind as Machine, was truly wonderful. A forty-five minute gallop through the field of AI, from the Dartmouth Conference to speculation about the future, with contributions from some of the top people in the field, including the magisterial Marvin Minsky.

On the philosophical side, there were short potted exchanges between John Searle and Dan Dennett on the subjects of semantic understanding and whether simulations could be said to be thinking. I particularly liked Dennett's response on to the simulation question:

Imagine a machine that can perform multiplication by looking things up in a table just like a human. The process isn't simulated multiplication, it really is multiplication.

Programmes like this are what make R3 special. It is, in the best possible way, shamelessly intelligent and resolutely highbrow. Long may it continue.

Comments

Mind as Machine

[(Anonymous)]

I'd love to hear this discussion from Radio 3, especially because I am a great fan of Margaret Boden, who I think helped organize that program. The program was on Sunday 18 March 2007, and
it looks like Radio 3 doesn't make its archives available because they "don't own the rights" to the programs. That's really lame: we can hear the Jack Benny shows from the 1940s (when I was a child) but not the programs from 2007! I wonder if SAWYL made a recording?

Marvin Minsky
minsky@media.mit.edu
MIT