Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!apple.com!bdelan From: bdelan@apple.com (Brian Delaney) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: What AI is exactly. Message-ID: <10072@goofy.Apple.COM> Date: 6 Sep 90 18:35:40 GMT Sender: usenet@Apple.COM Lines: 62 References:<34175@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <25392@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <3797@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <3543@gara.une.oz.au> In article <3543@gara.une.oz.au> pnettlet@gara.une.oz.au (Philip Nettleton) writes: > The system MUST be self aware. This is related to autonomy, reasoning > and learning, but also embodies the need for external senses. Without > external senses there is no way of appreciating the difference between > "me" and "outside of me". Sensationations of pain and pleasure can > provide motivation. The question of self-awareness is one of the things that Searle's CR gedankenexperiment is supposed to address. One interpretation of his basic claim is that a system can fulfill all of the rest of your requirements, and still not "know" anything, because it is not self-aware. Consider Searle's wording, "*I* don't understand Chinese." These characteristics are also not binary. A cat is *probably* self-aware, or at least, it behaves in a fashion whose simplest explanation is self-awareness. People are also self-aware, but to a very different degree. And amongst people, there are those whose self-awareness is quite developed. It includes an understanding of history, and personal psychology, and can consider questions like, "Who will I be in ten years?" And there are those people whose self-awareness leans more toward the feline direction. ( I'm hungry, I'm horny, I'm scared, I'm tired, etc. ) What degree of self-awareness is necessary to qualify as intelligent? Personally, I think that "intelligence" is an analog quantity. People, or machines, have it to greater or lesser degrees. The example of expert systems was mentioned before: that they display the appearence of intelligence, but that the system becomes very brittle when it gets outside its familiar domain. However, this is also true of humans. The difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence is one of degree rather than one of kind. This difference may be one of several dozen orders of magnitude, but it is still one of degree. For that matter, some people ( not you ) apply standards to machine intelligence that many humans couldn't pass. We set up a 5-way Turing test at school once, where the questioner was able to "talk" to 3 humans and an "Eliza" style program via keyboard. The questioner correctly identified the program as being artificial. However, the questioner also identified *me* as being artificial. She claimed that she could tell that I was a machine because I did not display a strong "emotional" reaction to questions she thought I should. She said that she could tell that I really didn't know what words like "love" meant, that I was just using the word syntactically rather than semantically. ( This amused my girlfriend no end. :-) ) Just because I discussed some emotional topics in a matter-of-fact way. You require that an intelligent being learn from experiences. How does this apply to a person who consistently screws up in the same way? It must reason about the universe. Must it do so correctly? Human reasoning about the universe is an inconsistent phenomenon at best. It is still far better than we can code, but it is still far from perfect. Even our simplest AI projects show occasional bursts of lucidity and "insight" that surprise the creators. And those creators can show occasional moments of mechanical route thinking. Does that mean that, at that brief, fleeting instant, that maybe the machine would qualify as intelligent, and the researcher would not? *************************************************************************** Brian "High Tech Sex and Affordable Firepower" Delaney Disclaimer: NOBODY, least of all Apple, thinks the way I do. ***************************************************************************