Chocolate Cubed

In this month’s AI Magazine there is an article titled “The voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?” by Doug Lenat.  Doug lists what he calls the top 12 reasons why AI hasn’t taken off to its fullest potential and where many already expected it to be by now.  I am not going to address all his 12 points, I am going to focus on one:  The Media and the Arts.

I agree with him that the media has taken some fantastic accomplishments and focused on the wrong or easiest aspects, but how could they have known which was the hardest or easiest task?  In the article he refers to a picture of the Sony Aibo dancing after having played a successful game of robot soccer autonomously.  Doug points out that the dancing was the easiest part of the entire task to do, which he is right about.  Does that matter to most people?   I don’t think most people realize that making a robot dance is less complicated than making it find a ball and kick it.  If you were to think of it in human terms, most people would classify both tasks as similarly complex.  Dancing involves moving with some sort of coordination and so does kicking a ball.

I don’t think the media is to blame, I  think it is the AI communities fault for not marketing their accomplishments properly.  We try to get each other’s respect and recognition, but never look to the rest of the world.  Most people don’t know how hard it is to accomplish true AI, they only know what they see in the movies and in the papers.  I work as a consultant and when I mention that I used to work with Elizabeth Sklar, PhD developing educational robots, most people start talking about the Roomba.  This is their association with robotics.  The AI community has already done bigger and better things, like the DARPA challenge, but hasn’t marketed it enough.  We see AI and Machine Learning in use in our everyday lives, like on recommendation engines on Amazon.com and Netflix.com, but since they aren’t highlighted and marketed as AI tools, no one notices them or refers to them when AI is discussed.  

I think that if we market our AI accomplishments and make them easy for everyone to use or contribute to, the community will gain tremendously.  I think a marketing effort could take a generation of web-savvy children and make them into AI researchers or developers.