Immer noch inspirierend – Douglas R. Hofstadter

The Albertus Magnus Professorship (or AMP for short) is a short series of events at the University of Cologne for which an outstanding scientist is appointed every year. This year (2018) it is Douglas R. Hofstadter. The focus is on “machine and human translations”. When I started my studies in 1985, my parents gave me his masterpiece “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, for which Douglas Hofstadter received the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and which was last published in 2008. The book was and is a milestone on the way to understanding phenomena such as “being” and “consciousness”. After a very inspiring lecture yesterday, it was really interesting to see how far “artificial intelligence”, in times of machine learning and deep learning, is actually from human intelligence. He evaluates the capabilities of artificial intelligence using machine translation algorithms (e.g. Google-Translate and DeepL) as an example and at the same time works out what distinguishes our intelligence from artificial intelligence.

{%CAPTION%}

A still current assessment of the topic MT (Machine Translation) goes back to Yehoshua Bar Hillel (1959, Hebrew University: http://www.mt-archive.info/Bar-Hillel-1959.pdf). I have taken it with me that there is still a dramatic difference between hype (machine learning and deep learning) and what we understand by intelligence and it is important to point this out again and again, especially in the context of Industry 4.0. Just to make sure that the expectations of machine learning and deep learning systems don’t get too high.