Q&A: Douglas Hofstadter on why AI is far from intelligent

The field of artificial intelligence may finally be coming back around to Douglas Hofstadter. Since winning a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter, 72, has been quietly thinking about thinking, and how we might get computers to do it. In the early days of AI research in 1950s and 60s, the goal was to create computers that think and learn the way humans do, by remodeling our ability to intuitively understand the world around us. But thinking turned out to be more complicated than something that could fit in a 1950s computer program. What did eventually yield results, though, was giving up on thinking altogether, focusing computers instead on highly specific tasks and giving them vast amounts of relevant data--resulting in the AI boom we see today. A computer can beat a human at chess not by searching for the satisfaction of making an elegant move, but sifting through millions of previously played games to see which move is more likely to lead to victory.