Arthur C. Clarke's First Law
Arthur C. Clarke's First law: " When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. " I was reminded of this as I started re-reading Goodbye Descartes by Keith Devlin (a mathematician/philosopher). To quote from the book: " Toward the end of the 1970s the AI and natural language understanding bubbles began to burst. " Then he mentions a philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus, who wrote a book "What Computers Can't Do," saying that AI programs would never scale up to anything useful. Just a year ago I heard a philosopher on a BBC podcast declare that " there will never be driverless cars. " She did not know what to say when it was pointed out that they already exist. I started playing around with neural networks after 1997 (when Devlin's book was published). It seems I'd forgotten what Devlin and Dreyfus had taugh