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Why are we so preoccupied with the notion of "artificial intelligence" in the first place? Artificial intelligence, if it can even be defined, does not seem li

Why are we so preoccupied with the notion of "artificial intelligence" in the first place? Artificial intelligence, if it can even be defined, does not seem like a particularly valuable goal. Why is emulating human cognition the metric by which we assess the utility of machine learning systems? I'd take a bunch of systems with superhuman abilities in specialized fields (driving, Go, etc.) over so-called "artificial intelligence" any day.

holri 10y ago
Because we want to play god.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  Because thinking is hard, and we want to turn it over to someone else.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    We wish for death. (This is identical to wanting to be God.)
    - morgante 10y ago
      Perhaps future AI philosophers will discuss the death of humanity.
alanbernstein 10y ago
Driving and go were considered waaay deep into "hard AI" just 10 years ago. Even if you mean to ask this question about "general artificial intelligence", you only need to go as far as speech or text comprehension for an example of something that needs to behave more or less like a person.
- morgante 10y ago
  > Driving and go were considered waaay deep into "hard AI" just 10 years ago. Oh, I know that. In fact, I think there are some very useful and very hard tasks which even AGI (at least a basic one) would not be able to solve. My point is that we should focus on applications, not person-ness. Whether a technique is similar to human cognition or not, or the result is similar to a person, is immaterial. Put simply, I don't think it matters much if all our super-powerful machines are ultimately Blockheads.
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    There is value in trying to emulate the human mind, which is in learning how the human mind works. A proper simulation of human intelligence would be an invaluable building block for health fields like psychology. Of course this is a very different kind of AI, and the focus on application specific measures of AI success have distracted from this goal.
- vintermann 10y ago
  No, being able to emulate a human is not necessary for understanding one and communicating with one. We can have great text comprehension (maybe even superhuman, won't that be fun?) and conversational interfaces without online learning, or without any overall model of interacting with the world.
montecarl 10y ago
I think humans can do some cool things that we haven't yet figured out how to make an algorithm for. We can explore our environment, perform experiments, make hypotheses, and ultimately generate theory which have predictive power. Algorithms that can do that would be valuable and would have similar properties to human intellect. One way to think of AI is what you say, highly specialized systems that have become very good at a specific task. This is very useful. It is also cool because you if you can define your problem well and come up with a fitness function then the algorithm solves your problem for you. Another way to think about AI, and this is a much more general type, is that it could possible learn new things and create new theories by performing its own experiments much like a human scientist does.
- morgante 10y ago
  > Algorithms that can do that would be valuable and would have similar properties to human intellect. I agree. A "scientist" algorithm would be quite cool and helpful. Where I disagree is whether that scientist algorithm should necessarily have intelligence that in any way resembles humanity. For all I care, it doesn't even need to be able to talk to be useful.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    I disagree with your disagreement. Talking - language - is intimately connected to "science", which, as a form of human knowledge, is about reducing the complexity of the universe down into semantic constructs that humans can appreciate. That is, "scientific knowledge" does not exist except in the form of human language. There is no other meaning to "science" (or "knowledge") except "making the universe intelligible to humans". A machine must also labor under these constraints, and so ultimately must produce knowledge in the form of language/semantics in order to be doing "science".
    - morgante 10y ago
      I agree that science requires some way of encoding and communicating information, but I don't agree that such a system must resemble human language. An alien system could equally do "science" even if their entire communication system was binary bits.
olalonde 10y ago
Because "specialised systems" are a subset of AGI (e.g. GI is capable of producing them), hence AGI is seen as the ultimate goal. > Why is emulating human cognition the metric by which we assess the utility of machine learning systems? It's not. It's only of interest to people and researchers who are primarily interested in AGI.
- morgante 10y ago
  > Because specialised systems are a subset of AGI (in the sense that GI is capable of producing them), hence AGI is seen as the ultimate goal. I don't think one necessarily follows from the other though. We might be able to make an AGI with the intelligence of a human teenager. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be better at driving a truck than a more specialized algorithm. > That would probably mean testing machine learning systems with something like Turing tests which no one is doing or advocating. I see a lot of people complaining that various machine learning techniques won't lead to AGI and would never create a system which could pass the Turing test. Even this article laments that neural nets don't actually resemble human cognition.
  - olalonde 10y ago
    > I don't think one necessarily follows from the other though. We might be able to make an AGI with the intelligence of a human teenager. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be better at driving a truck than a more specialised algorithm. I agree that an AGI wouldn't necessarily be good at driving trucks. I meant it in the sense that an AGI would be capable of producing the "truck driving algorithm" (if we humans can do it, the AGI can do it too, almost by definition). > I see a lot of people complaining that various machine learning techniques won't lead to AGI and would never create a system which could pass the Turing test. Most of the complaining seems geared towards media and outsiders who portray X technique as being the "Solution to AGI", not towards the techniques themselves.
eva1984 10y ago
I really dislike this notion. It reminds me either a giant evil computer hivemind or some sexy female robots. I think it is more a pop culture creation, the purpose of which is focused on sensational value that elicits fear or fascination, rather than a clearly defined concept.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

holri 10y ago

Because we want to play god.

jfoutz 10y ago
Because thinking is hard, and we want to turn it over to someone else.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  We wish for death. (This is identical to wanting to be God.)
  - morgante 10y ago
    Perhaps future AI philosophers will discuss the death of humanity.

alanbernstein 10y ago

Driving and go were considered waaay deep into "hard AI" just 10 years ago. Even if you mean to ask this question about "general artificial intelligence", you only need to go as far as speech or text comprehension for an example of something that needs to behave more or less like a person.

morgante 10y ago
> Driving and go were considered waaay deep into "hard AI" just 10 years ago. Oh, I know that. In fact, I think there are some very useful and very hard tasks which even AGI (at least a basic one) would not be able to solve. My point is that we should focus on applications, not person-ness. Whether a technique is similar to human cognition or not, or the result is similar to a person, is immaterial. Put simply, I don't think it matters much if all our super-powerful machines are ultimately Blockheads.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  There is value in trying to emulate the human mind, which is in learning how the human mind works. A proper simulation of human intelligence would be an invaluable building block for health fields like psychology. Of course this is a very different kind of AI, and the focus on application specific measures of AI success have distracted from this goal.
vintermann 10y ago
No, being able to emulate a human is not necessary for understanding one and communicating with one. We can have great text comprehension (maybe even superhuman, won't that be fun?) and conversational interfaces without online learning, or without any overall model of interacting with the world.

montecarl 10y ago

I think humans can do some cool things that we haven't yet figured out how to make an algorithm for. We can explore our environment, perform experiments, make hypotheses, and ultimately generate theory which have predictive power. Algorithms that can do that would be valuable and would have similar properties to human intellect. One way to think of AI is what you say, highly specialized systems that have become very good at a specific task. This is very useful. It is also cool because you if you can define your problem well and come up with a fitness function then the algorithm solves your problem for you. Another way to think about AI, and this is a much more general type, is that it could possible learn new things and create new theories by performing its own experiments much like a human scientist does.

morgante 10y ago
> Algorithms that can do that would be valuable and would have similar properties to human intellect. I agree. A "scientist" algorithm would be quite cool and helpful. Where I disagree is whether that scientist algorithm should necessarily have intelligence that in any way resembles humanity. For all I care, it doesn't even need to be able to talk to be useful.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  I disagree with your disagreement. Talking - language - is intimately connected to "science", which, as a form of human knowledge, is about reducing the complexity of the universe down into semantic constructs that humans can appreciate. That is, "scientific knowledge" does not exist except in the form of human language. There is no other meaning to "science" (or "knowledge") except "making the universe intelligible to humans". A machine must also labor under these constraints, and so ultimately must produce knowledge in the form of language/semantics in order to be doing "science".
  - morgante 10y ago
    I agree that science requires some way of encoding and communicating information, but I don't agree that such a system must resemble human language. An alien system could equally do "science" even if their entire communication system was binary bits.

olalonde 10y ago

Because "specialised systems" are a subset of AGI (e.g. GI is capable of producing them), hence AGI is seen as the ultimate goal. > Why is emulating human cognition the metric by which we assess the utility of machine learning systems? It's not. It's only of interest to people and researchers who are primarily interested in AGI.

morgante 10y ago
> Because specialised systems are a subset of AGI (in the sense that GI is capable of producing them), hence AGI is seen as the ultimate goal. I don't think one necessarily follows from the other though. We might be able to make an AGI with the intelligence of a human teenager. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be better at driving a truck than a more specialized algorithm. > That would probably mean testing machine learning systems with something like Turing tests which no one is doing or advocating. I see a lot of people complaining that various machine learning techniques won't lead to AGI and would never create a system which could pass the Turing test. Even this article laments that neural nets don't actually resemble human cognition.
- olalonde 10y ago
  > I don't think one necessarily follows from the other though. We might be able to make an AGI with the intelligence of a human teenager. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be better at driving a truck than a more specialised algorithm. I agree that an AGI wouldn't necessarily be good at driving trucks. I meant it in the sense that an AGI would be capable of producing the "truck driving algorithm" (if we humans can do it, the AGI can do it too, almost by definition). > I see a lot of people complaining that various machine learning techniques won't lead to AGI and would never create a system which could pass the Turing test. Most of the complaining seems geared towards media and outsiders who portray X technique as being the "Solution to AGI", not towards the techniques themselves.

eva1984 10y ago

I really dislike this notion. It reminds me either a giant evil computer hivemind or some sexy female robots. I think it is more a pop culture creation, the purpose of which is focused on sensational value that elicits fear or fascination, rather than a clearly defined concept.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]