The Artificial Intelligence Debate: False Starts, Real Foundations

Rating:
Summary: Genuine Insight
Review: If you want to understand the fundamental issues related to the issue of artifical intelligence, especially relating to the war between the formal systems advocates and the neural network folks, this book is invaluable. It is a collection of compelling essays by some of the brightest and/or most lauded researchers in the field.

One essay rips apart the seams of the phenomological challenges of making a generally intelligent system and explained why (in 1988) that the attempt was doomed to failure, at least for the foreseable future.

The sad fact is, there are still people like Steven Pinkert who continue to repeat the "Symbol System Hypothesis" with religious fervor. If you read and understand Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus's essay "Making a mind vs Modeling a Brain" you will come to understand why Artificial Intelligence has failed its promise for more than 30 years and why it is such an incredibly difficult problem to solve.