the story of the Copernican Revolution shows that science was, from its birth, a dynamic process, with good points and bad points on both sides of the debate. Not until decades after Kepler’s On the New Star and Locher and Scheiner’s Mathematical Disquisitions did astronomers begin to come upon evidence suggesting that the star sizes they were measuring, either with the eye or with early telescopes, were a spurious optical effect, and that stars did not need to be so large in a Copernican universe."The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" should be required reading, but isn't because it would destroy the aura of infallibility the university pinheads enjoy.
We have to equip machines with a model of the environment. If a machine does not have a model of reality, you cannot expect the machine to behave intelligently in that reality. The first step, one that will take place in maybe 10 years, is that conceptual models of reality will be programmed by humans.More or less my conclusion. The nice part is that computers already have a nice model of resource scarcity, and discoverable rules that can form the basis of cause-and-effect reasoning.
The next step will be that machines will postulate such models on their own and will verify and refine them based on empirical evidence. That is what happened to science; we started with a geocentric model, with circles and epicycles, and ended up with a heliocentric model with its ellipses.
Robots, too, will communicate with each other and will translate this hypothetical world, this wild world, of metaphorical models.
