Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning straight streets make people unhappy

Joe Monzo wrote,

> I understand the point this author (who is it ?) is making,

Willingboro. Saturday 17 May 1969.

What will I remember of this town: the sound of lawnmowers, the smell
of weekend barbecues in the backyards, the retired military men and
the retired insurance agents who are our neighbors, decent folk with
their red checkered shirts and baseball caps, and the boredom of the
curved streets. Psychologist have discovered that straight streets
make people unhappy, so everything here curves like the halls of the
Queen Mary, meeting other curving streets, all the way to the main
highway.

On Wednesday I went to Princeton. I was kindly received and the
seminar I gave on information retrieval met with polite applause. Then
a man with intense eyes and silver hair took me aside. We sat on the
benches in the lab next to the lecture hall. He said, "There is a
fundamental fallacy in artificial intelligence, and your falling into
it like everybody else."

"In what respect?" I asked with the feeling this discussion was not
going to conform to the usual exchange of generalities heard at most
professional meetings.

"Artificial intelligence is trying to emulate nature, it wants to
approximate what man does."

"What other inspiration is there?"

"Imitation of nature is bad engineering," he answered patiently. "For
centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they killed
themselves uselessly. If you want to make something that flies,
flapping your wings is not the way to do it. You bolt a 400-horsepower
engine to a barn door, that's how you fly. You can look at birds
forever and never discover this secret. You see, Mother Nature never
developed the Boeing 707. Why not? Because nature didn't need anything
that would fly that fast and that high. How would such an animal feed
itself?"

"What does that have to do with artificial intelligence?"

"Simply that it tries to approximate man. If you take man's brain as a
model and test of intelligence, your making the same mistake as the
old inventors flapping their wings. You don't realize that Mother
Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, she has
never bothered to develop one!"

I could only greet this stunning thought with silence. He went on:

"When an intelligent entity is finally built, it will have evolved on
principles very different from those of man's mind, and its level of
intelligence will certainly not be measured by the fact that it can
beat a chess champion or appear to carry out a conversation in
English."

Dan

straight streets make people unhappy

🔗D.Stearns <STEARNS@CAPECOD.NET>

🔗Monz <MONZ@JUNO.COM>