It was lost interest from investors and government.

All that money poured into AI research produced little rewards. There were expert systems that worked well and they became profitable businesses, but othervice there was little to show. In retrospect I think it was good idea to adjust the money to match the results and wait until computer scientist come up with new ideas.

Current Ai boom is result from 'Canadian mafia' diligently working and actually producing results and faster computing, especially GPCPU.

Unless we get constant stream of new ideas that build up on the current ones, there should reduced interest and investments once most benefits have been materialized.

One could similarly say about our time: "there were neural network applications that worked well, but otherwise there was little to show". What is the fundamental difference between what is going on now and what was happening before the previous AI winter?

I feel that people constantly misrepresent how impressive expert systems seemed back in their heyday. They had a lot of practical applications and they could do some very cool tricks.

Interestingly, the highly impressive accomplishments of SVMs, random forests and boosting went mostly unnoticed, precisely because of the AI Winter.

Congress might be full of idiots or smart people trying to make you believe they're idiots, but don't for a moment think the federal government as a whole is technologically stunted.

And governments will always want to avoid risks, especially risks that knock them out of their monopolies on force and economic power.

Moreover, controlling AI research is ever harder than nuclear research. Creating a technological disadvantage compared to rogue states without such regulations does not seem like a good idea.

Gambler: "I already got five 6's. I can't possibly get another one. That's a statistical improbability!"

Wrong assumption: Past dice rolls affect future rolls where as dice rolls are independent. Its improbably to get six 6's in a row but GIVEN that you have 5 sixes, getting a sixth is just 1/6

Am I right?

Gambler: "I already got five 6's. I must be on a roll! I'll surely get another one."

I won't hold my breath for them to produce anything of value here.

We almost solved image/speech recognition in the past 5 years. Once those works went out of academia to real application, the amount of disruption to the current society is pretty hard to imagine.

But we are getting closer.

[1]: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...

The actual quote is, "Just avoid holding it in that way" which is different.

And Apple is not really good at machine learning either

Does anybody actually do that? Most "online education" still seems to be canned lectures. There was work on this from the 1960s to the 1990s, but efforts seem to have stalled.[1] There are drill-and-practice systems, but they're really just workbooks with automatic scoring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system

Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.

The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word teachers. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is curious about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo

[1] http://www.instituteofplay.org

I am currently teaching middle school and high school and I think nothing is further from the truth. A few kids do, maybe most children of HN's parents, ... but most kids don't care at all about programming, science or building anything.

It's a lot harder to do differentiation than it sounds. After 10 min of hour-of-code many are bored out of their mind, say they don't like video games and want to do something else (acting, paint _without code_, do sports, take selfies, gossip, read a novel, etc ...).

Teenagers congregated in the same place, away from their parents? That's the age when humans tend to get much more curious about other humans. You could have them code on paper, and reason with each other while looking at each other.

There's a lot of work being done in places were the pockets are deeper (military, simulations, medicine). Recently, standards (xAPI, Caliper) have started to emerge to enable the decoupling of content, content delivery, and interaction (think MVC pattern) and to enable pervasive, multi-modal learning activity tracking.

A fun if unrealistic alternative, have the professor move fast enough to give the illusion of individual clones for each student: https://youtu.be/ZJy8qH8Fw5s

[0] http://www.siyavula.com/

In the meantime we still have the same basic needs. This is an attempt to map out what they are: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs

For instance, where do we widen a road? Absolutely an algorithmic problem. But I suspect sometimes these types of decisions have more to do with contributions, political favors, relations, etc.

Solving even part of this type of friction in society would go a long way toward improving life for the general population.

Bring on the A.I. I'd rather be governed by a machine than a party boss and a lobbyist any day.

Not to the people living on either side of it who stand to lose their homes. "Computer says yes" would be a political nightmare.

As long as you have people making the decisions you can have the comforting illusion that it may be possible to make them change their minds.

Replace the people with an AI and the comforting illusion disappears.

You'll have people taking to the streets with pitchforks to protest against tyranny in no time - even if the AI is much better at making intelligent decisions.

People's needs need to be taken into account, yes, that is what it is all about in the end.

But a few people's inconvenience or greed outweighing the general progress is not a long term formula for successful society.

The reason why I believe this is complicated, but it's based on the assumption that Aesthetic is somehow tied to discrimination (security) and thus can't be forced upon reality without affecting quality.

Software locks up when you double bind it, and thus uses more energy than a human would. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, of course.

There's already a ton of gov't interest/activity on surveillance and security issues, mostly via the military services and adjuncts. I assume this initiative ain't more of that.

This announcement seems to presage greater federal gov't interest and involvement in how computing might be used toward less defensive/clandestine ends, especially in governance (social good), control, and safety, as well as legal implications -- adding AI as the means to serving gov't ends, so to speak.

If so, great. I'd love to see greater OPEN use of computing in government, especially in gathering unbiased metrics and making better use of them to evaluate the outcome of changes in policy.

I'm not all that excited about interacting with more AI.

As Dijkstra said, asking whether a machine can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim. And in the real world, nobody cares whether it's swimming or not, they just care whether it's solving their problem. Which all of these little bits and pieces of human-replacing technology most certainly are doing.

"to spur public dialogue on artificial intelligence and machine learning and identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology."

The only unclear thing about politico speak generally is that is not clear if they will do X or if they just wanted to publicly claim that they'll do X for some PR or voter support, with no intention to actually do it.

We have a law to make humans work exactly the same way. Law is a set of rules that say who is guilty and who's not. Only that humans are bad at being objective: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...

As long as humans write the law, and that there is the notion of a sovereign people, human judges should decide how to interpret and apply the law.

I think we should strive for well written laws that don't require so much interpretation.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunchtime-leniency...