Wishful Thinking

This section, Preface 4, centers around Hofstadter's reception of more well known “AI” projects and their fallacies. When comparing the work of Hofstadter's group with the more ambitious projects, sadly, the group's work falls into the background. Whether this has to do purely with the eye of the public, or some other force that draws focus away from the group's achievements, the attention, I think, is a touch misguided. While it would be nice for AI projects to be so successful so often and with such ease, it strikes me as more of a wishful thinking sort of thing.

We don't know nearly enough about the human mind, so how can we move on to create mechanical ones, let alone anything approaching super-human AI? It seems like people are just waiting for the day we develop true AI, but that day is a long way down the road. For that matter, we haven't sufficiently developed systems that model some of the more complex cognitive features of ourselves. Hofstadter is on the right track with his models of mental mechanisms. Even if they make no steps toward an ultimate solution, they allow us to think of the problem in a different light. Are they really making no progress just because they are models? Is it how we think about the problem, or is it about real, concrete evidence or results? I guess it depends on who you ask. The models are great, but what do they really accomplish? What sort of tool are they? They've gotten me to think of a lot of things differently... is that their intended effect or is it a happy by-product? For another generation of people doing work similar to Hofstadter, even the latter can inspire vast progress in my opinion. (Perhaps an interesting thought here: For us to achieve AI, we first have to change the way we think about what we think.)

So far, popularization isn't helping much at all, I think. Is another totally arbitrary work of fiction going to help us make advances in how we understand the questions about how(why, when) we think? Not that art can't contribute to the respective studies, but I wonder what people really think about Cognitive Science in respect to the creative work about AI the media produces.

Another thought:
(When people ask me what my major is (Outside your standard academic environment, of course.) I tell them that I have two. Computer Science is one; Cognitive Science is the other. Computer Science gets the “Oh, thats cool.” response usually, while Cognitive Science has always gotten the “...what exactly is that?” response. I guess a lot of things contribute to this sort of general knowledge/public perception (or lack thereof) ... though I wish I could get the same response for both of them.)