Looking for some people to refute this recently hair-brained idea I came up with.
The time period from the advent of the industrial revolution to the so-called digital revolution was about 150 - 200 years. Even though computers were being used around WWII, widespread computer use didn't start to shake things up until 1990 or so. I would imagine that AI would constitute a similar fundamental shift in how we live our lives. So would it be a reasonable extrapolation to think that widespread AI would be about 150 - 200 years after the beginning of the information age?
I'm a firstyear AI student, and we are currently in the middle of exploring AI 'history'. Ofcourse I don't know a lot about about AI yet, but the interesting part about learning of the history of AI is that in some sense the climax of AI-research is already behind us. People got very interested in AI after the Dartmouth conference ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences ) and were so optimistic that they thought they could make an artificial intelligent system in 20 years. And here we are, still struggling with the seemingly simplest things s...
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.