Douglas Lenat

Douglas Lenat

Douglas Bruce Lenat (September 13, 1950 – August 31, 2023) was an American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence who was the founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas.

Quotes

• Intelligence is ten million rules. This refers to the prior and tacit knowledge that authors presume their readers all possess (such as "if person x knows person y, then x's date of death can't be earlier than y's date of birth") not counting the vastly larger number of "facts" such as one might find in Wikipedia or by Googling.
  • Lenat, Douglas (1988) . "The Case for Inelegance". Proceedings of the International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Industrial Applications, Tokyo, May 1988..

• The time may come when a greatly expanded Cyc will underlie countless software applications. But reaching that goal could easily take another two decades.
  • Wood, Lamont. Cycorp: The Cost of Common Sense, Technology Review, March 2005

• Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing.
  • Michael A. Hiltzik (21 June 2001), "Birth of a Thinking Machine", Los Angeles Times 

• Sometimes the veneer of intelligence is not enough.
  • Sometimes the Veneer of Intelligence is Not Enough | CogWorld (in en). cognitiveworld.com.

• If computers were human, they’d present themselves as autistic, schizophrenic, or otherwise brittle. It would be unwise or dangerous for that person to take care of children and cook meals, but it’s on the horizon for home robots. That’s like saying, ‘We have an important job to do, but we’re going to hire dogs and cats to do it.'
  • Love, Dylan (July 2, 2014). The Most Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project In The World Has Been Operating In Near Secrecy For 30 Years. Business Insider.

• "What we needed, is nothing less than an “AI Manhattan Project”, a full frontal assault on common sense: the challenge is to create an Encyclopédia of Common sense", Michio Kaku citing Lenat.
  • Kaku, Michio (1999-03-04) (in en). Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century. OUP Oxford. pp. 64. ISBN 978-0-19-288018-5.