Talk:MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Project MAC
The Project MAC article states "Project MAC was started on July 1, 1963" and this article used to state "The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was ... founded in 1959" and "was originally a subdivision of Project MAC", making the AI Lab "originally" a subdivision of something which wasn't founded until 4 years later. Working from a reference cited in the Project MAC article, I've corrected the timeline in this article. C. Scott Ananian 17:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

"Institute Professor" nominated for deletion
The article titled Institute Professor has been nominated for deletion by user:Kane5187, who says not all of the 10-or-12-or-so Institute Professors are notable. This while many MIT professors who are not Institute Professors have Wikipedia articles and are universally considered notable (and so do most of the Institute Professors). Please opine at Articles for deletion/Institute Professor. Your input is needed! Michael Hardy 00:59, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Merger
I have nominated MIT AI Lab and Project MAC to be merged into the CSAIL article and dropped the proposed merger into MIT School of Engineering pending the state of the newly merged article. Let's aim for a merge of the 3 lab articles by August 28 and then take up discussion of merging CSAIL into MIT SoE then. Madcoverboy 19:56, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Attention needed
Chaosdruid (talk) 21:23, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Refs - check
 * List to prose - research activities
 * Expand

From MAC to cloud computing
In the early sixties, MIT project MAC aimed at provide shared computing resources at a time when one who needed computing power had to record his own programs and data on punched cards. In these days the most common, not to say unique, communication tool was the TTY teleprinter.

Unhappily the first experiments of on-line computing, by linking a TTY to a computer, accepted a very limited number of simultaneous users. The reasons were the low performance and capacity yielded by the hardware available in the sixties.

Nonetheless, from an architectural design standpoint, Project MAC outlined a general computing environment, including a high degree of security/privacy and a real ability to take advantage of more powerful hardware to come.

MULTICS systems, designed and engineered by General Electric, have represented a milestone in the project development. Bell Laboratories operated several of these machines for their computer developments, including UNIX (allegedly named after "MULTIX"), as General Electric/Honeywell did for their software factories (PL1 being the main working language).

On the other hand, General Electric made commercial offers for "utility computing services" based on the same platforms, by 1968.

Astonishingly, the concept and the services they marketed were similar to those provided by the present "cloud computing".

"Independent" personal micro computers were by large more in line with the mood of that period, and Utility computing did not emerge as a success ! A simpler version, Time-sharing, had been a little more successful.

Bernard Huet 193.248.17.158 (talk) 21:28, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Robots / Artificial Intelligence Machines can never become conscious
It seemed that some years before researchers at MIT and elsewhere were quite convinced that a human being is completely made up of matter/material energy and is ultimately a highly advanced computer--a highly advanced machine. Is that conviction still alive? Is it possible that robots / advanced AI machines will one day become completely cognizant of their surroundings, will possess emotions (happiness, anger, shame/shamelessness, embarrassment, audacity, rascaldom, cunning etc.)/feelings (pride, grief, narcissism, superiority/inferiority complexes etc.) and will develop consciousness on the level of current human beings/animals? Are the researchers with all the money at hand, close to achieving this in the near or distant future? (What exactly does "shame" reduce to in advanced AI systems language? What kind of particle interactions?) Why is nothing mentioned about this in the article? -59.95.14.55 (talk) 18:25, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

[This reader/editor of Wikipedia articles would like to state that try as they might for millions of years the most intelligent researchers would never, ever be able to make a robot / advanced AI machine even slightly conscious by any purely material (modern scientific) methods, because the modern researchers are totally unaware of totally non-material entities (beyond the jurisdiction of modern material/mental sciences) which form the very basis of consciousness and they think what they cannot understand no one else (outside their field) can. They can take it as a challenge and try it, instead of hoping that it will happen in future. They will never do this. This is an opinion, but a well researched and thought one. ] -59.95.14.55 (talk) 18:21, 13 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Is it not possible that after all, the most advanced robot/AI machine of the future may at best become an extremely sophisticated philosophical zombie, but never, ever a conscious entity, but still the developers of the machine will try to pass it off as "conscious". -59.95.14.55 (talk) 18:51, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

AI Lab founding in 1959
This student paper is very well-written and includes a number of first-hand interviews, and is a good citation for the lab's founding in 1959:

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/AILab.pdf

Arghman (talk) 18:37, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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