l likelihood, be a robot; a robot has explored Mars, beaming pictures back to NASA headquarters, long before any human will ever walk on the Red Planet; an electronic paper-clip painlessly guides confused users through the operation of Microsoft Word, the state-of-the-art in word processing (and several hundred thousand times larger in terms of memory than the first word processing programs). Why is it that, throughout all of this, a sense of reason remains conspicuously absent? Will these patchwork solutions ever be fit together to provide a well-rounded intelligence? Is there anything that will remain elusively out of the grasp of computers? Approaches to Artificial Intelligence When computers were first developed, it was clear that they possessed huge mathematical capabilities. Their speed and accuracy at complex calculations had never before been seen. Many researchers in the field regarded it as just a matter of time before computers surpassed humans in the area of intelligence as well. For years, machines had far outstripped humans in strength and stamina. Now computers made it clear that humans’ ability in calculation was nowhere near what could be achieved. Why should general reason and common sense, which seemed to be acquired by humans nearly effortlessly, be any different? What the initial scientists and programmers failed to realize was that the shift from the kind of logical rationalism displayed by a computer to the creative associasionalism exhibited by humans is not a natural extension of similar concepts but a complete paradigm shift, and that success in one, however astonishing, does not portend success in the other. Since the 1940s, computers have infiltrated themselves within human society, but many misconceptions continue to hold sway. Information has become the lifeblood of the modern world, just as factories were earlier and just as land was before that. A person with a computer in the early 2...
