Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 35 of 171
Strong AI versus weak AI
Building an intelligent machine that can match the cognitive capabilities of humans has been the dream of artificial intelligence researchers since the middle of the last century, when Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann built the theoretical foundation upon which modern computer science stands. Back in the 1950s, as the excitement around the birth of the first computers spread, an intelligent robot that could walk, talk, see, hear, feel, perceive, understand, think, and reason seemed just around the corner. In the 1960s Marvin Minsky famously declared that “within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” What is artificial intelligence? If we go with the most ambitious definition, or strong AI as it is called, it means creating an artificial mind. This is opposed to weak AI, which is more or less what Watson can already do,