> Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines. […] [machine's] music can never be the Eroica or “This Land is Your Land,” because there is no algorithm with the creative and life experience of Beethoven or Woody Guthrie.
Of course, I agree with the practical point where no current machine can do human art. Because of that we can't currently automatically extract the semantics of an image, or even convert a post-script document into clean HTML. So, it doesn't affect the conclusion in the foreseeable future.
But one can't seriously believe there's no algorithm behind an artist's art without believing in some kind of ghost controlling her brain, and that ghost somehow doesn't run an algorithm. As far as I know, there is no such ghost. It very much looks like our cognition (including our art), is entirely the product of physical processes, even though it definitely doesn't feel like it.
Now, I reckon art is not just the product of some internal algorithm, running in isolation from the rest of the world. We're highly interactive beings, and our output mostly depend on our input. But there is some kind of algorithm which does all these interactions, though it is likely incredibly complex.
My point is, I wouldn't loose hope of automating something that currently, only humans can do. Take spam filters, for example. With very little knowledge, they can take out spam with stunning accuracy. But if no-one told me about Bayesian filters, I would likely try to make the computer parse the whole e-mail like a human, then give up, thinking that only humans can understand those e-mails well enough to filter them (note my mistaken assumption that the spam filter somehow must acquire some high-level understanding of the e-mail to do its job).
> Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines. […] [machine's] music can never be the Eroica or “This Land is Your Land,” because there is no algorithm with the creative and life experience of Beethoven or Woody Guthrie.
Of course, I agree with the practical point where no current machine can do human art. Because of that we can't currently automatically extract the semantics of an image, or even convert a post-script document into clean HTML. So, it doesn't affect the conclusion in the foreseeable future.
But one can't seriously believe there's no algorithm behind an artist's art without believing in some kind of ghost controlling her brain, and that ghost somehow doesn't run an algorithm. As far as I know, there is no such ghost. It very much looks like our cognition (including our art), is entirely the product of physical processes, even though it definitely doesn't feel like it.
Now, I reckon art is not just the product of some internal algorithm, running in isolation from the rest of the world. We're highly interactive beings, and our output mostly depend on our input. But there is some kind of algorithm which does all these interactions, though it is likely incredibly complex.
My point is, I wouldn't loose hope of automating something that currently, only humans can do. Take spam filters, for example. With very little knowledge, they can take out spam with stunning accuracy. But if no-one told me about Bayesian filters, I would likely try to make the computer parse the whole e-mail like a human, then give up, thinking that only humans can understand those e-mails well enough to filter them (note my mistaken assumption that the spam filter somehow must acquire some high-level understanding of the e-mail to do its job).