Steven Pinker Answers Questions About IBM's Jeopardy-Winning Supercomputer
Watson’s win has brought Artificial Intelligence back into the spotlight, and Steven Pinker takes the opportunity to talk about the golden age of A.I., meaning the 1960s and ’70s. What’s different about A.I. today is a matter of transparency. During the golden age, ideas flowed freely among researchers at various companies. Since then, due to tougher competition, companies have been less likely to share their ideas in the public domain, choosing instead to work on applied projects in-house. So, Pinker says, unless IBM breaks from this closed culture and reveals what went into Watson’s construction, “we won’t be able to know how much of the program’s success to attribute to humanlike or superhuman intelligence, and how much to Jeopardy-specific hacks.”
Photo above courtesy of Rebecca Goldstein.
Read more about neuroscience speaker Steven Pinker