The Failure of AI

In the early days of AI, scientists thought they would be able to build an intelligent computer by the end of the 20th century. This raised various fears about computers eventually taking over the world, and human beings replaced by robots.
Not only this did not happen yet but we are very far from this!
But what is even worse is that we are now following a somewhat opposite trend. There are many tasks at which humans are far better than computers, but instead of trying to build better algorithms for these tasks, people are now trying to find ways to better make use of human intelligence, or rather to automate this usage!

Two examples of this: Luis von Ahn's "Artificial artificial intelligence" and Amazon's "Mechanical Turk".

Luis von Ahn has designed a couple of internet games whose purpose is to make players perform useful tasks such as labeling images. Amazon is taking this to the industrial scale (although not as a game anymore) by allowing people to design programs which include calls to web services which are actually executed by paid humans (e.g. your program calls "translate(text)" and the text is sent to someone who translates the text and return the result)!

Update (21/12/2006): I found a related article in the Boston Globe, citing other examples of the same kind, such as Mozes Mob, a cell phone Q&A service powered by humans.

Comments

[Carole-Ann Matignon]

I don't think this is a failure so much as a renewed recognition that there is an A in AI - Artificial. To me artificial intelligence should be different from human intelligence. I think the idea of load balancing between people and computers is a great one - see http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/07/load_balancing_.html

[Olivier Bousquet]

The title of my post was intentionally provocative.
But I agree with you: combining both human and artificial intelligence(s) is probably a promising direction.

[Matthew Hurst]

In the early days of AI there was solid motivation to study the area both by better understanding and to better understand human intelligence. This part of the programme has been lost in the vast array of niche areas of study that are currently associated with AI. If one associates the 'completion' of AI research with a full(er) understanding of human intelligence, then one wouldn't be surprised at the rate of success.

Personally, I believe in the inevitable appearance of strong AI. It wouldn't surprise me, however, that it will come from an unexpected direction. That is to say, not out of academic research labs, but out of some highly capitalized business area such as computer games or humanoid robotics.

[Jean-Marc Kerisit]

I agree with you: the totalitary vision of Artificial Intelligence has definitely failed (hopefully for ever); and time is coming for a more modest AI dream: take benefinit of all technologies to propose to human beings developing and enhancing their intelligence power thanks to ergonomic cooperation with algorithms, systems and machines. Would AI enable us to become more human ? This seems to me a hopeful question to raise...