AI skepticism

Speaking of artificial intelligence, as I've been doing quite a bit lately, there's an interesting and amusing note of skepticism from psychologist and computer scientist Roger Schank in reponse to the Edge question "What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?" Excerpt from his answer "Artificial Intelligence":

I declare Artificial Intelligence dead. The field should be renamed " the attempt to get computers to do really cool stuff" but of course it won't be. You will never have a friendly household robot with whom you can have deep meaningful conversations. I happened to be a judge at this year's Turing Test (known as the Loebner Prize.) The stupid stuff that was supposed to be AI was just that, stupid. It took maybe 30 seconds to figure which was a human and which was a computer.

Me: On a related note, also see Rodney A. Brooks' answer "The Computational Metaphor," and kudos to Edge for including this one, which is sure to raise some hackles: Douglas Rushkoff's "The Atheism Prerequisite."