Helkp wanted on Artifical Intelligence Essay

irishgeo

i am a 4th year degree student and i need some places to get information

on the following article topic.
" Artifical Intelligence (AI) ssytems will replace Decision Support Systems."
i have to discuss this statement in a 12 page esssay to handed up on the
8th of
April.

any sites or articles on this topic would be a help.
i have tired a google search but the results returned are huge and i would
need
till the 8th of april to research the google sites alone.

Thanks in advance.

seamus

Check out the science forum. We had a discussion on AI there recently. Some good problems/points were raised, and maybe some links posted. Might be of use to you.

DadaKopf

What exactly is the question about? Is it specifically related to computers or is it generally on the question of the possibility of AI?

For what it's worth, I've studied Philosophy of Mind which involves questions about AI so I know some stuff about it.

Get back to me and I'll probably be able to furnish you with some links or book references. I'm just not sure how relevant any of this stuff would be.

In either case, I'd love to read your essay when you get it done, if that's OK.

Tom Dunne

I did one a year or two ago for my degree and found loads of info at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

Try MIT Research Lab

TD.

sceptre

John L Casti devotes most of a chapter of Paradigms Lost to the pros and cons of the idea (why it can work, why it can't, why it's good, why it's bad)

Well worth a read. Most college libraries should have a copy (well UL does)

DadaKopf

Ok, since I'm revising it for my exams, overviews and articles approaches to AI and cognitive research include:

Daniel Dennett
"Kinds of Minds"
"The Intentional Stance" (in particular: the chapter called 'Fast Thinking')
"Intentional Systems" (from Modern Philosophy of Mind William Lyons (ed.)

John Searle
"The Rediscovery of Mind" (he tackles AI head on with his 'Chinese Room' thought experiment, 'strong' refuting AI)

Richard Dawkins
"The Blind Watchmaker"

Don't know books by them but Computationalists and Functionalists worth checking out, if you haven't aready are:

J. A. Fodor
Zenon Pylyshyn
Marvin Minsky
Alan Turing

Then there's the radical ones, the Eliminative Materialists who are closest to a totally neurophysiological/neural net opinion:

Paul and Patricia Churchland
(it's also worth checking out the Identity Theorists: J. J. C. Smart and U. T. Place both of whose articles are in Lyons' Modern Philosophy of Mind)

If you're into neural nets, Parallel Process Distributive Networks etc, you might want to check out Dennett again and Donald Hebb who has done a lot of work in 3-dimensional neural networking of the brain, how wememorise, learn, compute and react etc.

For an overview type thing there are two helpful books:
A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Samuel Guttenplan ed.) published by Blackwell and I think A Companion to Cognitive Science also published by Blackwell.

MIT also has a huge Cognitive Science/AI department and a huge publishing house so you could could do no worse than to check out their online store and look around then find similar titles in your library. I know I say something like An MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science or something like that.

Hope that's of some help.

sceptre

John Searle's effort is well worth reading (forgot about it). Some obvious problems with the thesis (even for someone like me that hasn't had a real interest in AI in years)

DadaKopf

Here's a fairly useful link about the Cinese Room Argument:
http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/kognitiotiede/searle.html

There was a better one but it's gone now.

I dunno, I wrote an essay attempting to refute Searle because I think his argument is hokum - he wants to preserve some 'specialness of consciousness' while being a natural materialist which sort of excludes any specialness of anything beyond bundles of neurons. We're just really, really complicated.

That said, Searle's anti-functionalist, anti-computationalist view is certainly a good criticism of AI as it is now but to say it's impossible at a point where we don't even barely understand the workings of the brain/mind is very premature. But then, the functionalists and computationalists ain't all that either.

The best reading on the subject I've come across is Dennett, and especially his writings when he's directly taking Searle on (brilliantly in The Intentional Stance). Dennett says that intentional systems (any system that can be ascribed a certain degree of self-interested optimal design and whose behaviour is relatively predictable) begin with viruses or macromolecules - they are intentional systems and that's as real as intentionality gets. We're just much more complicated. So, understanding isn't some special thing, some magical qualia, it's down to causal association and biology. We've reached the point we have through evolution, afterall, we're all descended from amino acids! Searle is still holding out for the qualia, he can keep looking all he likes but he won't find it.

wildcard

This is not helpful I know, but I was wondering if you could email me a copy of the completed essay? I'd love to read it. My address is shane@shaneland.co.uk

irishgeo

i email anyone a copy of it when i finished it but its not due till the 8th of april so expect around the 6th or 7th.

DadaKopf

Get that essay done yet?

GoneShootin

ill have one too please...

its free right ?

irishgeo

have only just started it now.