Early in my career, a housemate told me about his adventures teaching a robot arm to build a tower of blocks using an AI framework for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. Define a block. Define a tower of blocks. Find the block. Pick the block up. Place the block. Place another block, and so on to make a tower. Oh wait, the arm doesn't know about gravity so it tries to start at the top and work downward. Teach the arm about gravity. Oh, that is a glass table top, so learn to start there instead of crashing through to start on the ground. And so on.
Read moreMarvin Minsky at TEDMED3: what we need from artificial intelligence
In the time I set aside today to keep working on my biography of Richard Saul Wurman, I pulled some videos off of a CDROM that was shipped to attendees of RSW’s third TEDMED conference, in 2003. The image and sound quality are what you’d expect from analog-to-digital conversion circa 2003. But the content is as good as it gets.
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