But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
Interpretation
Advancements in understanding technology and machines can lead to the development of a formal science.
Marvin Minsky suggests that, similar to how astronomy evolved from astrology through rational discoveries, the empirical studies of how machines process information will eventually culminate in a systematic and scientific understanding of intelligence in machines. This analogy highlights the importance of observing and analyzing complex systems to reveal underlying principles that govern their functioning.
In practice
In a lecture about the future of artificial intelligence, one might use this quote to illustrate the evolution of understanding in technology.
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.
Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.
The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.
Of course it is possible that UFO's really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the government is hushing it up
A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution.
How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
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