Nick Bostrom in Superintelligence on the failure of Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, a 10-year plan at the end of the twentieth centruy to create a massive supercomputer that could house complex AI. He’s quoting Jacob Schwartz here:
At this point [following the failure of Japan’s Fifth-Generation Computer Systems Project], a critic could justifiably bemoan “the history of artificial intelligence research to date, consisting always of very limited success in particular areas, followed immediately by failure to reach the broader goals at which these initial successes seem at first to hint.”
I’m not a total AI skeptic — I just think that our capacity for dreaming far outstrips the real pace of technology. Computing, like every field of science, is built on more failures than successes.
