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Conclusion

 

Many will find dismayingly large the list of tasks that must be accomplished in order to to reach human-level logical intelligence. Perhaps fewer but more powerful ideas would simplify the list. Others will claim that a system that evolves intelligence as life does will be more straightforward to build. Maybe, but the advocates of that approach have been at it as long as we have and still aren't even close.

So it's a race.

It will be much more scientifically satisfying to understand human level artificial intelligence logically than just achieve it by a computerized evolutionary process that produced an intelligent but incomprehensible result. In fact, the logical approach would be worth pursuing even if the intellectually lazy evolutionary approach won the race.



John McCarthy
Sun Apr 19 15:21:34 PDT 1998