Notes

Looking back at the history of AI, we can see that perhaps it began at the wrong end of the spectrum. If AI had been tackled logically, it would perhaps have begun as an artificial biology, looking at living things and saying "Can we model these with machines?". The working hypothesis would have been that living things are physical systems so let's try and see where the modeling takes us and where it breaks down. Artificial biology would look at the evolution of physical systems in general, development from infant to adult, self-organization, complexity and so on. Then, as a subfield of that, a sort of artificial zoology that looks at sensorimotor behavior, vision and navigation, recognizing, avoiding and manipulating objects, basic, pre-linguistic learning and planning, and the simplest forms of internal representations of external objects. And finally, as a further subfield of this, an artificial psychology that looks at human behavior where we deal with abstract reasoning, language, speech and social culture, and all those philosophical conundrums like consciousness, free will and so forth.