Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 34 of 171
Watson versus Robin Williams
The massive amount of cultural or semantic information stored in a human brain is readily and appropriately accessible in the right contexts. What are these contexts, and how does the brain identify them? The key to this mechanism is likely the vague and fuzzy logic our brains use to learn. The previous examples illustrate that even though Watson can be lightning fast and accurate, when “he” is wrong he is absurdly wrong. Mental illness would be suspected if a human were to come up with these associations. The enormous leap from a system like Watson—which can mimic or exceed human performance in very constrained tasks like looking up answers to trivia questions—to a system that can mimic the comedic miracle that was Robin Williams is perhaps too much to ask of artificial intelligence. Achieving anything close to this will require a radical departure from how current AI research conceives the human brain and intelligence. While it could be that a system like Watson can operate successfully (most of the time) without consciousness, a system like an artificial Robin Williams could not.