Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!linus!mbunix!bwk From: bwk@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Barry W. Kort) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Free Will & Self-Awareness Message-ID: <31390@linus.UUCP> Date: 9 May 88 16:28:40 GMT References: <4134@super.upenn.edu> <3200014@uiucdcsm> <1484@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <717@taurus.BITNET> <1501@houdi.UUCP> Sender: news@linus.UUCP Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort) Organization: International Teleport and Telepath, Beantown, Mass. Lines: 18 Keywords: Learning, Verifying, Predicting, Choosing, Creating Summary: Howdy, Marty. I was gratified to see Marty Brilliant's entry into the discussion. I certainly agree that an intelligent system must be able to evolve its knowledge over time, based information supplied partly by others, and partly by its own direct experience. Thomas Edison had a particularly rich and accurate knowledge base because he was a skeptic: he verified every piece of scientific knowledge before accepting it as part of his belief system. As a result, he was able to envision devices that actually worked when he built them. I think Minsky would agree that our values are derived partly from inheritance, partly from direct experience, and partly from internal reasoning. While the state of AI today may be closer to Competent Systems rather than Expert Systems, I see no reason why the field of AI cannot someday graduate to AW (Artificial Wisdom), in which an intelligent system not only knows something useful, it senses that which is worth knowing. --Barry Kort