Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!eos!labrea!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Defining Machine Intelligence.
Message-ID: <713@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 20 Nov 88 06:53:44 GMT
References: <484@soleil.UUCP> <4216@homxc.UUCP> <401@uwslh.UUCP> <1111@dukeac.UUCP> <404@uwslh.UUCP>
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Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <404@uwslh.UUCP> lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Fish-Guts) writes:
>     Many (if not most) attempts at definitions of "machine
>intelligence" relate it to "human intelligence." However, I have yet
>to find a good definition of "human intelligence" that is less vague
>than a dictionary's definition.  It would seem (to me at least) that
>AI scientists (as well as scientists in many other fields) have yet to
>come up with a good, working definition of "human intelligence" that
>most will accept.  Rather, most AI people I have spoken with
>(including myself ;-) have a vague notion of what "human intelligence"
>is, or else have definitions of "human intelligence" that relies on
>many personal assumptions.  I still do not think that the AI community
>has developed a definition of "human intelligence" that can be
>universally presented in an introductory course on AI.  It is no
>wonder, then, that there is no commonly accepted definition of machine
>intelligence (which would seem to be a crucial definition in AI, IMHO).

I think it is useful to bear in mind that "intelligence" is a _social_
construct.  We can identify particular characters which are associated
with it, and we may be able to measure those.  (For example, one of the
old intelligence tests identified knowing that Crisco (sp?) is a cooking
oil as a component of intelligence.)  It is _NOT_ the responsibility of
AI people to define "human intelligence".  It is the job of sociologists
to determine how the notion of "intelligence" is deployed in various
cultures, and of psychologists to study whatever aspects turn out to be
based on mental characteristics of the individual.

The field called "Machine Intelligence" or "Artificial Intelligence" is
something which originated in a particular related group of cultures and
took the "folk" notion of "intelligence" as its starting point.  We wave
our hands a bit, and say "you know how smart people are, and how dumb
machines are, well, we want to make machines smarter."  At some point we
will declare victory, and whatever we have at that point, _that_ will be
the definition of "machine intelligence".  ("Intelligent" is already used
to mean "able to perform the operations of a computer", so is "smart" in
the phrase "smart card".)

Let's face it, 13th century philosophers didn't have a definition of "mass",
"potential field", "tensor", or even "hadron" when they started out trying
to make sense of motion.  They used the ordinary language they had.  The
definitions came _last_.

There are at least two approaches to AI, which may be caricatured as
(1) "Let's build a god"
(2) "Let's build amplifiers for the mind"
I belong to the second camp:  I don't give a Continental whether we end
up with "machine intelligences" or not, just so long as we end up with
cognitive tools which are far more intelligible to humans than what we
have now.  For the first camp, the possibility of "inhuman" machine
intelligences is of interest.  It would definitely be a kind of success.
For the second camp, something which is not close enough to the human
style to be readily comprehended by an ordinary human would be an utter
failure.

We are still close enough to the beginnings of AI (whatever that is) that
both camps can pursue their goals by similar means, and have useful things
to say to each other, but don't confuse them!