But he did have something very specific that he wanted to explore with Sarkar, and he began without preamble. “How do you create an artificial intelligence? You work in that field — how do you do it?” Sarkar looked surprised. “Well, there are many ways. The oldest is the interview method. If we wanted a system to do financial planning, we would ask questions of several financial planners. Then we reduce the answers as a series of rules that can be expressed in computer code — ‘if A and B are true, do C.’” “But what about that scanner my company built for you? Aren’t you doing full brain dumps of specific people now?” “We’re making good progress toward that. We’ve got a prototype called RICKGREEN, but we’re not ready to go public with it. You know that comedian, Rick Green?” “Sure.” “We did a full scan of him. The resulting system can now tell jokes that are just as funny as the ones the real Rick tells.
