Successful Software | …requires more than just good programming.
This is mainly a review of Brian Cantwell Smith’s latest book, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment . But it’s also a second attempt to understand more of his overall project and worldview, after struggling through On the Origin of Objects a few years ago. I got a lot out of reading that, and wrote up what I did understand in my post on his idea of representations happening in the ‘middle distance’ between direct causal coupling and total irrelevance. But somehow the whole thing ne
The new book is an easier read, but still not exactly straightforward. He’s telling an intricate story, and as with OOO the book is one single elegant arc of argument with little redundancy, so it’s not a forgiving format if you get lost. And I did get lost, in the sense that I’ve still got the ‘I’m missing something’ feeling. Part of the reason I’m posting in this on my ‘proper’ blog and not the notebucket is that I wanted the option of getting comments (this worked very well for the middle distance post a
So, first, let’s explain the part that I do understand. The early part of the book is about the history of AI, and of course there’s been a whole lot more of this since OOO ‘s publication in 1996. He divides this history into ‘first-wave’ GOFAI , with its emphasis on symbolic manipulation, and the currently successful ‘second wave’ of AI based on neural networks. There’s also a short ‘transition’ chapter on the 4E movement (’embodied, embedded, extended, enacted’) between the two waves, which he describes a
Successful Software | …requires more than just good programming.