ekurtz99{at}WhoKnowsWhere.com wrote in
news:cdm2fk$2qeq$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> William Morse wrote:
>> My point is that even with all the progress,
>> the smartest computers are much stupider than the stupidest humans,
>> at least as far as language abilities are concerned. Will they stay
>> that way? No, given the increase in computer abilities, they should
>> be more than able to handle even the complexities of real spoken
>> language within 20 years at the outside, the good lord willin' and
>> the creek don't rise. 
> 
> The fundamental mistake here is the implcit assumption that advances
> in machine understanding of language are problems of storage and cpu
> speed; they are not; if that's all they were, machines would be able
> to converse at speeds slower than a human but in a realistic way.
> Obviously they cannot.

I realize that advances in language are more than problems of storage and 
cpu speed. In particular, the classic computer architecture is well 
suited to logic problems but ill suited to the kind of processing 
involved in language. But in any case your statement is incorrect. Ants 
cannot converse at speeds slower than a human - they cannot converse at 
all. Even chimps can only converse haltingly after much specific 
training. It is likely that it takes a very high degree of complexity to 
begin to converse - and current computers are nowhere close to that 
level. So it is too early to tell if advances in cpu speed and storage 
will eventually allow computer speech even with the current limited 
understanding of how language is constituted.

 
> It is one of the conceits of the AI profession, or at least of its lay
> apologists, that Moore's law will solve every current AI problem. It 
> won't. There is the small matter of the software...

But the software is also evolving, albeit at a much slower rate than the 
hardware.

 
Yours,

Bill Morse
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