Computational Intelligence/Artificial Intelligence - mainstream?

Question

Hello,

can one consider Computational Intelligence and/or Artificial Intelligence as mainstream? or are they just "art"?

Thanks

Answer 1

When artificial intelligence techniques are mainstreamed, we no longer think of them as artificial intelligence. For example, the automatic place and routing programs that design PCB traces or generate FPGA bitstreams are solving difficult constraint satisfaction problems in a very large search space... and yet these days we hardly think of it as remarkable let alone intelligent. Especially when the PCB designers can do a better job.

Answer 2

Essentially what's happened is that as techniques from AI research has been explored and proven useful, they've been broadly adopted by whoever has a use for it, and frequently enough those people don't even think of it as having anything to do with AI (especially "strong AI"). That certainly seems like a sort of mainstreaming to me, though whether it's mainstreaming AI "as AI" is debatable.

Of course, the pervasive use of AI techniques which are actively thought of as being AI in the multi-billion-dollar game industry is probably more than enough mainstreaming in itself.

Answer 3

The idea of machines performing intelligently is certainly part of popular culture(the Matrix, Terminator, A.I.), as such it could be viewed as both art and mainstream.

Much of the philosophy of AI is in the popular discourse. The Strong AI vs Weak AI debate can be heard being argued in your local coffee shop.

The actual study of Artificial Intelligence is very much not-mainstream. A* is not a term one heres every day even in the computer industry.

Of course the fruits of AI research are used constantly in the computer industry. Databases, Speech Recognition and much of what we take for granted in modern programing languages were once the cutting edge of AI. As soon as a AI research topic becomes possible it generally ceases to be seen as part of AI.

Answer 4

Rather than classifying AI as a whole as either art or mainstream, I'd say that over the years, there have been parts of those fields that have become integral to some everyday technologies (things like some machine learning and light/sound recognition systems) and have become so pervasive that we don't really think of them as AI anymore. Thus, as the state of the art advances, these technologies have become "mainstream" to some extent, and the field of AI has moved on to newer, more interesting, and more challenging problems. In this sense, the field itself will probably never be thought of as mainstream since research is always done only at the edges of the envelope.

Answer 5

While there's definitely some truth to the saying "Once it actually works, it's no longer AI." I strongly resent the phrase "just art". JUST art? Art is what we all (should) aspire to.

And while perhaps some AI is "just" twittering with logic puzzles, some of it has actually produced useful offshoots, like NLP, Databases, and so forth, as others have mentioned.

Additionally, I don't see how "mainstream" is opposed to "art".

I think what you wanted to ask is "Is AI USEFUL, or is it just POINTLESS TWITTERING WITH LOGIC PUZZLES?" And the answer, is it's a lot of both. However, so is Data bases. Some graphics is useful, and some is pointless twittering with teapots and chess pieces. I can keep going.