Connectionists: Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning

[Richard Loosemore]

Dear Imad,

Fair comment, although I heard Jeurgen say much the same thing 14 years 
ago, at the AGI conference in 2009, so perhaps you can forgive me for 
being a little weary of this tune...?

More *substantively* let me say that this field is such that many 
ideas/algorithms/theories can be SEEN as variations on other 
ideas/algorithms/theories, if you look at them from just the right angle.

If I may add a tongue-in-cheek comment.  I got into this field in 1981 
(my first supervisor was John G. Taylor).  By the time the big explosion 
happened in 1985-7, I was already thinking far beyond that paradigm.  
When thinking about what thesis to do, to satisfy my Warwick Psych Dept 
overseers in 1989, I invented, on paper, many of the ideas that later 
became Deep Learning.  But those struck me as tedious and ultimately 
irrelevant, because I wanted to understand the whole system, not make 
pattern association machines.  This is NOT a claim that I invented 
anything first, but it IS meant to convey the idea that to people like 
me who come up with novel ideas all the time, but try to stay focussed 
on what they consider the genuine prize, all this fighting for a place 
in the history books seems pathetic.

There, that's my arrogant thought-for-the day.  You can now safely 
ignore me again.

Richard Loosemore









On 1/27/23 3:29 AM, Imad Khan wrote:
> Dear Richard,
> I find your comment a bit unwarranted. You could, however, follow Gary 
> Marcus' way to put forward critical thoughts. I do not necessarily 
> agree with Gary, but I agree with his style. I am reproducing Gary's 
> text below for your convenience. Juergan is an elder of AI and 
> deserves respect (like all of us do). I did go to your website and 
> you're correct to say that AI systems are complex systems and an 
> integrated approach is needed to save another 20 years!
>
> Gary's excerpt:
> image.png
> Regards,
> Dr. M. Imad Khan
>
>
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2023 at 04:41, Richard Loosemore 
> <rloosemore at susaro.com> wrote:
>
>
>     Please, somebody reassure me that this isn't just another attempt to
>     rewrite history so that Schmidhuber's lab invented almost everything.
>
>     Because at first glance, that's what it looks like.
>
>     Richard
>
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