Re: Why Not a Planet Of The Apes?

Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Mon, 9 Jun 1997 12:13:44 -0700 (PDT)


Hal Finney writes:
>My guess would be that AI would not be very interesting if we thought
>that the best we were ever going to do was to make something as smart
>as monkeys. Sure, achieving monkey-level intelligence and abilities
>would be an amazing accomplishment by today's standards, but nobody
>expects progress to end there. The real hope is to create human or
>super-human intelligence.

I'm not sure whether most AI reserachers have thought about this
choice, but I think monkey intelligence would be sufficient for the
vast majority of military and commercial applications imagined for AI,
and used to justify funding. Lanaguage use might be the big
exception, but from what Greg Burch said, it may not even be that hard
to teach them language once they are domesticated.

Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/