THE AGE of INTELLIGENT MACHINES Thoughts About Artificial Intelligence

One of the visionaries in the field of AI shares his thoughts on AI, from the beginning of the last decade. From Ray Kurzweil's revolutionary book The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in 1990. It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of "intelligence" seems so elusive: it describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work. It is hard for scientists who try to understand intelligence to explain precisely what they do, since our working definitions change from year to year. But it is not at all unusual for sciences to aim at moving targets. Biology explores the moving frontier of what we understand of what happens inside our bodies. Only a few decades ago the ability of organisms to reproduce seemed to be a deep and complex mystery.