philosophy of AI
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The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the
philosophy of technology The philosophy of technology is a sub-field of philosophy that studies the nature of technology and its social effects. Philosophical discussion of questions relating to technology (or its Greek ancestor ''techne'') dates back to the very dawn of ...
that explores
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
and its implications for knowledge and understanding of
intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
,
ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...
,
consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
,
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
, and
free will Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...
. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people (or, at least, artificial creatures; see
artificial life Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry ...
) so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Some scholars argue that the AI community's dismissal of philosophy is detrimental. The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as follows: * Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve ''any'' problem that a person would solve by thinking? * Are human intelligence and machine intelligence the same? Is the
human brain The human brain is the central organ of the human nervous system, and with the spinal cord makes up the central nervous system. The brain consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. It controls most of the activities of the ...
essentially a computer? * Can a machine have a
mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...
, mental states, and
consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
in the same sense that a human being can? Can it ''feel how things are''? Questions like these reflect the divergent interests of AI researchers,
cognitive scientists Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
and
philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
s respectively. The scientific answers to these questions depend on the definition of "intelligence" and "consciousness" and exactly which "machines" are under discussion. Important
proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
s in the philosophy of AI include some of the following: * Turing's "polite convention": If a machine behaves as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being.This is a paraphrase of the essential point of the
Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to artificial intelligence, exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing propos ...
. , , ,
* The Dartmouth proposal: "Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.". This assertion was printed in the program for the
Dartmouth Conference The Dartmouth Conference is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between American and Soviet (now Russian) representatives. The first Dartmouth Conference took place at Dartmouth College in 1961. Subsequent conferences were held through 1990 ...
of 1956, widely considered the "birth of AI."also
*
Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department ...
and
Herbert A. Simon Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...
's
physical symbol system A physical symbol system (also called a formal system) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions. The physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH ...
hypothesis: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means of general intelligent action." and *
John Searle John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mario ...
's
strong AI hypothesis The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind," "understanding" or "consciousness," regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was prese ...
: "The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds."This version is from , and is also quoted in . Searle's original formulation was "The appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states." . Strong AI is defined similarly by : "The assertion that machines could possibly act intelligently (or, perhaps better, act as if they were intelligent) is called the 'weak AI' hypothesis by philosophers, and the assertion that machines that do so are actually thinking (as opposed to simulating thinking) is called the 'strong AI' hypothesis." *
Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influe ...
' mechanism: "For 'reason' ... is nothing but 'reckoning,' that is adding and subtracting, of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the 'marking' and 'signifying' of our thoughts..."


Can a machine display general intelligence?

Is it possible to create a machine that can solve ''all'' the problems humans solve using their intelligence? This question defines the scope of what machines could do in the future and guides the direction of AI research. It only concerns the ''behavior'' of machines and ignores the issues of interest to
psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...
s, cognitive scientists and
philosophers A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
; to answer this question, it does not matter whether a machine is ''really'' thinking (as a person thinks) or is just ''acting like'' it is thinking. The basic position of most AI researchers is summed up in this statement, which appeared in the proposal for the
Dartmouth workshop The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a 1956 summer workshop widely consideredKline, Ronald R., Cybernetics, Automata Studies and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Annals of the History of ...
of 1956: * "Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." Arguments against the basic premise must show that building a working AI system is impossible because there is some practical limit to the abilities of computers or that there is some special quality of the human mind that is necessary for intelligent behavior and yet cannot be duplicated by a machine (or by the methods of current AI research). Arguments in favor of the basic premise must show that such a system is possible. It is also possible to sidestep the connection between the two parts of the above proposal. For instance, machine learning, beginning with Turing's infamous child machine proposal essentially achieves the desired feature of intelligence without a precise design-time description as to how it would exactly work. The account on robot tacit knowledge eliminates the need for a precise description all together. The first step to answering the question is to clearly define "intelligence".


Intelligence


Turing test

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...
reduced the problem of defining intelligence to a simple question about conversation. He suggests that: if a machine can answer ''any'' question put to it, using the same words that an ordinary person would, then we may call that machine intelligent. A modern version of his experimental design would use an online
chat room The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from ...
, where one of the participants is a real person and one of the participants is a computer program. The program passes the test if no one can tell which of the two participants is human. Turing notes that no one (except philosophers) ever asks the question "can people think?" He writes "instead of arguing continually over this point, it is usual to have a polite convention that everyone thinks". Turing's test extends this polite convention to machines: * If a machine acts as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being. One criticism of the
Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to artificial intelligence, exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing propos ...
is that it only measures the "humanness" of the machine's behavior, rather than the "intelligence" of the behavior. Since human behavior and intelligent behavior are not exactly the same thing, the test fails to measure intelligence.
Stuart J. Russell Stuart Jonathan Russell (born 1962) is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct ...
and
Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born December 14, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is t ...
write that "aeronautical engineering texts do not define the goal of their field as 'making machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons'".


Intelligent agent definition

Twenty-first century AI research defines intelligence in terms of
intelligent agent In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or may use knowledge. They may be simple or c ...
s. An "agent" is something which perceives and acts in an environment. A "performance measure" defines what counts as success for the agent. * "If an agent acts so as to maximize the expected value of a performance measure based on past experience and knowledge then it is intelligent." Definitions like this one try to capture the essence of intelligence. They have the advantage that, unlike the Turing test, they do not also test for unintelligent human traits such as making typing mistakes or the ability to be insulted. They have the disadvantage that they can fail to differentiate between "things that think" and "things that do not". By this definition, even a thermostat has a rudimentary intelligence.


Arguments that a machine can display general intelligence


The brain can be simulated

Hubert Dreyfus Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (; October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of bo ...
describes this argument as claiming that "if the nervous system obeys the laws of physics and chemistry, which we have every reason to suppose it does, then ... we ... ought to be able to reproduce the behavior of the nervous system with some physical device".This argument, first introduced as early as 1943 and vividly described by
Hans Moravec Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on ...
in 1988, is now associated with futurist
Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and e ...
, who estimates that computer power will be sufficient for a complete brain simulation by the year 2029. A non-real-time simulation of a thalamocortical model that has the size of the human brain (1011 neurons) was performed in 2005 and it took 50 days to simulate 1 second of brain dynamics on a cluster of 27 processors. Even AI's harshest critics (such as
Hubert Dreyfus Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (; October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of bo ...
and
John Searle John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mario ...
) agree that a brain simulation is possible in theory. However, Searle points out that, in principle, ''anything'' can be simulated by a computer; thus, bringing the definition to its breaking point leads to the conclusion that any process at all can technically be considered "computation". "What we wanted to know is what distinguishes the mind from thermostats and livers," he writes. Thus, merely simulating the functioning of a living brain would in itself be an admission of ignorance regarding intelligence and the nature of the mind, like trying to build a jet airliner by copying a living bird precisely, feather by feather, with no theoretical understanding of
aeronautical engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: Aeronautics, aeronautical engineering and Astronautics, astronautical engineering. A ...
.


Human thinking is symbol processing

In 1963,
Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department ...
and
Herbert A. Simon Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...
proposed that "symbol manipulation" was the essence of both human and machine intelligence. They wrote: * "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means of general intelligent action." This claim is very strong: it implies both that human thinking is a kind of symbol manipulation (because a symbol system is ''necessary'' for intelligence) and that machines can be intelligent (because a symbol system is ''sufficient'' for intelligence). Another version of this position was described by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who called it "the psychological assumption": * "The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules." The "symbols" that Newell, Simon and Dreyfus discussed were word-like and high levelsymbols that directly correspond with objects in the world, such as and . Most AI programs written between 1956 and 1990 used this kind of symbol. Modern AI, based on statistics and mathematical optimization, does not use the high-level "symbol processing" that Newell and Simon discussed.


Arguments against symbol processing

These arguments show that human thinking does not consist (solely) of high level symbol manipulation. They do ''not'' show that artificial intelligence is impossible, only that more than symbol processing is required.


=Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments

= In 1931,
Kurt Gödel Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an imme ...
proved with an
incompleteness theorem Complete may refer to: Logic * Completeness (logic) * Completeness of a theory, the property of a theory that every formula in the theory's language or its negation is provable Mathematics * The completeness of the real numbers, which implies t ...
that it is always possible to construct a "Gödel statement" that a given consistent
formal system A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system. A form ...
of logic (such as a high-level symbol manipulation program) could not prove. Despite being a true statement, the constructed Gödel statement is unprovable in the given system. (The truth of the constructed Gödel statement is contingent on the consistency of the given system; applying the same process to a subtly inconsistent system will appear to succeed, but will actually yield a false "Gödel statement" instead.) More speculatively, Gödel conjectured that the human mind can correctly eventually determine the truth or falsity of any well-grounded mathematical statement (including any possible Gödel statement), and that therefore the human mind's power is not reducible to a ''
mechanism Mechanism may refer to: * Mechanism (engineering), rigid bodies connected by joints in order to accomplish a desired force and/or motion transmission *Mechanism (biology), explaining how a feature is created *Mechanism (philosophy), a theory that ...
''. Philosopher John Lucas (since 1961) and
Roger Penrose Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fello ...
(since 1989) have championed this philosophical anti-mechanist argument., , Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments tend to rely on the innocuous-seeming claim that a system of human mathematicians (or some idealization of human mathematicians) is both consistent (completely free of error) and believes fully in its own consistency (and can make all logical inferences that follow from its own consistency, including belief in its Gödel statement) . This is provably impossible for a Turing machine to do (see
Halting problem In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a g ...
); therefore, the Gödelian concludes that human reasoning is too powerful to be captured by a Turing machine, and by extension, any digital mechanical device. However, the modern consensus in the scientific and mathematical community is that actual human reasoning is inconsistent; that any consistent "idealized version" ''H'' of human reasoning would logically be forced to adopt a healthy but counter-intuitive open-minded skepticism about the consistency of ''H'' (otherwise ''H'' is provably inconsistent); and that Gödel's theorems do not lead to any valid argument that humans have mathematical reasoning capabilities beyond what a machine could ever duplicate. This consensus that Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments are doomed to failure is laid out strongly in ''
Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
'': "''any'' attempt to utilize (Gödel's incompleteness results) to attack the computationalist thesis is bound to be illegitimate, since these results are quite consistent with the computationalist thesis."LaForte, G., Hayes, P. J., Ford, K. M. 1998. Why Gödel's theorem cannot refute computationalism.
Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
, 104:265-286, 1998.
Stuart Russell and
Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born December 14, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is t ...
agree that Gödel's argument does not consider the nature of real-world human reasoning. It applies to what can theoretically be proved, given an infinite amount of memory and time. In practice, real machines (including humans) have finite resources and will have difficulty proving many theorems. It is not necessary to be able to prove everything in order to be an intelligent person. Less formally,
Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...
, in his
Pulitzer prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...
winning book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,'' states that these "Gödel-statements" always refer to the system itself, drawing an analogy to the way the
Epimenides paradox The Epimenides paradox reveals a problem with self-reference in logic. It is named after the Cretan philosopher Epimenides of Knossos (alive circa 600 BC) who is credited with the original statement. A typical description of the problem is giv ...
uses statements that refer to themselves, such as "this statement is false" or "I am lying". But, of course, the
Epimenides paradox The Epimenides paradox reveals a problem with self-reference in logic. It is named after the Cretan philosopher Epimenides of Knossos (alive circa 600 BC) who is credited with the original statement. A typical description of the problem is giv ...
applies to anything that makes statements, whether they are machines ''or'' humans, even Lucas himself. Consider: * Lucas can't assert the truth of this statement. This statement is true but cannot be asserted by Lucas. This shows that Lucas himself is subject to the same limits that he describes for machines, as are all people, and so
Lucas Lucas or LUCAS may refer to: People * Lucas (surname) * Lucas (given name) Arts and entertainment * Luca Family Singers, also known as "lucas ligner en torsk" * ''Lucas'' (album) (2007), an album by Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities * ''L ...
's argument is pointless. After concluding that human reasoning is non-computable, Penrose went on to controversially speculate that some kind of hypothetical non-computable processes involving the collapse of
quantum mechanical Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, qua ...
states give humans a special advantage over existing computers. Existing quantum computers are only capable of reducing the complexity of Turing computable tasks and are still restricted to tasks within the scope of Turing machines. . By Penrose and Lucas's arguments, existing quantum computers are not sufficient , so Penrose seeks for some other process involving new physics, for instance quantum gravity which might manifest new physics at the scale of the Planck mass via spontaneous quantum collapse of the wave function. These states, he suggested, occur both within neurons and also spanning more than one neuron. However, other scientists point out that there is no plausible organic mechanism in the brain for harnessing any sort of quantum computation, and furthermore that the timescale of quantum decoherence seems too fast to influence neuron firing.


=Dreyfus: the primacy of implicit skills

= Hubert Dreyfus argued that human intelligence and expertise depended primarily on fast intuitive judgements rather than step-by-step symbolic manipulation, and argued that these skills would never be captured in formal rules., , . See also , and Dreyfus's argument had been anticipated by Turing in his 1950 paper
Computing machinery and intelligence "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is a seminal paper written by Alan Turing on the topic of artificial intelligence. The paper, published in 1950 in ''Mind'', was the first to introduce his concept of what is now known as the Turing test to ...
, where he had classified this as the "argument from the informality of behavior." Turing argued in response that, just because we do not know the rules that govern a complex behavior, this does not mean that no such rules exist. He wrote: "we cannot so easily convince ourselves of the absence of complete laws of behaviour ... The only way we know of for finding such laws is scientific observation, and we certainly know of no circumstances under which we could say, 'We have searched enough. There are no such laws.'" Russell and Norvig point out that, in the years since Dreyfus published his critique, progress has been made towards discovering the "rules" that govern unconscious reasoning. The
situated {{dictionary In artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the term situated refers to an agent which is embedded in an environment. The term ''situated'' is commonly used to refer to robots, but some researchers argue that software agents c ...
movement in
robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...
research attempts to capture our unconscious skills at perception and attention.
Computational intelligence The expression computational intelligence (CI) usually refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. Even though it is commonly considered a synonym of soft computing, there is still no c ...
paradigms, such as
neural net Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
s,
evolutionary algorithm In computational intelligence (CI), an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduc ...
s and so on are mostly directed at simulated unconscious reasoning and learning. Statistical approaches to AI can make predictions which approach the accuracy of human intuitive guesses. Research into
commonsense knowledge In artificial intelligence research, commonsense knowledge consists of facts about the everyday world, such as "Lemons are sour", that all humans are expected to know. It is currently an unsolved problem in Artificial General Intelligence. The f ...
has focused on reproducing the "background" or context of knowledge. In fact, AI research in general has moved away from high level symbol manipulation, towards new models that are intended to capture more of our ''intuitive'' reasoning. Cognitive science and psychology eventually came to agree with Dreyfus' description of human expertise.
Daniel Kahnemann Daniel Kahneman (; he, דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was award ...
and others developed a similar theory where they identified two "systems" that humans use to solve problems, which he called "System 1" (fast intuitive judgements) and "System 2" (slow deliberate step by step thinking). Although Dreyfus' views have been vindicated in many ways, the work in cognitive science and in AI was in response to specific problems in those fields and was not directly influenced by Dreyfus. Historian and AI researcher
Daniel Crevier Daniel Crevier (born 1947) is a Canadian entrepreneur and artificial intelligence and image processing researcher. He is also the author of ''AI: the Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence''. In 1974 Crevier received a Ph.D. ...
wrote that "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."


Can a machine have a mind, consciousness, and mental states?

This is a philosophical question, related to the
problem of other minds The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem is that knowledge of ...
and the
hard problem of consciousness The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to d ...
. The question revolves around a position defined by
John Searle John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mario ...
as "strong AI": * A physical symbol system can have a mind and mental states. Searle distinguished this position from what he called "weak AI": * A physical symbol system can act intelligently. Searle introduced the terms to isolate strong AI from weak AI so he could focus on what he thought was the more interesting and debatable issue. He argued that ''even if we assume'' that we had a computer program that acted exactly like a human mind, there would still be a difficult philosophical question that needed to be answered. Neither of Searle's two positions are of great concern to AI research, since they do not directly answer the question "can a machine display general intelligence?" (unless it can also be shown that consciousness is ''necessary'' for intelligence). Turing wrote "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness… t I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question f whether machines can think" under "(4) The Argument from Consciousness". See also , where they identify Searle's argument with Turing's "Argument from Consciousness." Russell and Norvig agree: "Most AI researchers take the weak AI hypothesis for granted, and don't care about the strong AI hypothesis." There are a few researchers who believe that consciousness is an essential element in intelligence, such as
Igor Aleksander Igor Aleksander FREng (born 26 January 1937) is an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networks a ...
,
Stan Franklin Stan Franklin (born August 14, 1931) is an American scientist. He is the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems.Shepar ...
,
Ron Sun Ron Sun is a cognitive scientist who made significant contributions to computational psychology and other areas of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He is currently professor of cognitive sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ...
, and Pentti Haikonen, although their definition of "consciousness" strays very close to "intelligence". (See
artificial consciousness Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC) or synthetic consciousness (; ), is a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The aim of the theory of artificial consciousness is to "Define that wh ...
.) Before we can answer this question, we must be clear what we mean by "minds", "mental states" and "consciousness".


Consciousness, minds, mental states, meaning

The words "
mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...
" and "
consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
" are used by different communities in different ways. Some
new age New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars conside ...
thinkers, for example, use the word "consciousness" to describe something similar to
Bergson Henri-Louis Bergson (; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopherHenri Bergson. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 August 2014, from https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/61856/Henri-Bergson
's "
élan vital ''Élan vital'' () is a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book '' Creative Evolution'', in which he addresses the question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner ...
": an invisible, energetic fluid that permeates life and especially the mind.
Science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
writers use the word to describe some essential property that makes us human: a machine or alien that is "conscious" will be presented as a fully human character, with intelligence, desires,
will Will may refer to: Common meanings * Will and testament, instructions for the disposition of one's property after death * Will (philosophy), or willpower * Will (sociology) * Will, volition (psychology) * Will, a modal verb - see Shall and will ...
, insight, pride and so on. (Science fiction writers also use the words "sentience", "sapience", "self-awareness" or "
ghost A ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that is believed to be able to appear to the living. In ghostlore, descriptions of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to rea ...
"—as in the ''
Ghost in the Shell ''Ghost in the Shell'' is a Japanese cyberpunk media franchise based on the seinen manga series of the same name written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow. The manga, first serialized in 1989 under the subtitle of ''The Ghost in the Shell'' ...
'' manga and anime series—to describe this essential human property). For others , the words "mind" or "consciousness" are used as a kind of secular synonym for the
soul In many religious and philosophical traditions, there is a belief that a soul is "the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being". Etymology The Modern English noun ''soul'' is derived from Old English ''sāwol, sāwel''. The earliest attes ...
. For
philosophers A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
,
neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, Biological neural network, n ...
s and
cognitive scientists Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
, the words are used in a way that is both more precise and more mundane: they refer to the familiar, everyday experience of having a "thought in your head", like a perception, a dream, an intention or a plan, and to the way we ''see'' something, ''know'' something, ''mean'' something or ''understand'' something. "It's not hard to give a commonsense definition of consciousness" observes philosopher John Searle. What is mysterious and fascinating is not so much ''what'' it is but ''how'' it is: how does a lump of fatty tissue and electricity give rise to this (familiar) experience of perceiving, meaning or thinking? Philosophers call this the
hard problem of consciousness The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to d ...
. It is the latest version of a classic problem in the
philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
called the " mind-body problem". A related problem is the problem of ''meaning'' or ''understanding'' (which philosophers call "
intentionality ''Intentionality'' is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it ha ...
"): what is the connection between our ''thoughts'' and ''what we are thinking about'' (i.e. objects and situations out in the world)? A third issue is the problem of ''experience'' (or "
phenomenology Phenomenology may refer to: Art * Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties Philosophy * Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
"): If two people see the same thing, do they have the same experience? Or are there things "inside their head" (called "
qualia In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term ''qualia'' derives from the Latin neuter plural form (''qualia'') of the Latin adjective '' quālis'' () ...
") that can be different from person to person? Neurobiologists believe all these problems will be solved as we begin to identify the
neural correlates of consciousness The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refer to the relationships between mental states and neural states and constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use empi ...
: the actual relationship between the machinery in our heads and its collective properties; such as the mind, experience and understanding. Some of the harshest critics of
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
agree that the brain is just a machine, and that consciousness and intelligence are the result of physical processes in the brain. The difficult philosophical question is this: can a computer program, running on a digital machine that shuffles the binary digits of zero and one, duplicate the ability of the
neurons A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. N ...
to create minds, with mental states (like understanding or perceiving), and ultimately, the experience of consciousness?


Arguments that a computer cannot have a mind and mental states


Searle's Chinese room

John Searle John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mario ...
asks us to consider a
thought experiment A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. History The ancient Greek ''deiknymi'' (), or thought experiment, "was the most anci ...
: suppose we have written a computer program that passes the Turing test and demonstrates general intelligent action. Suppose, specifically that the program can converse in fluent Chinese. Write the program on 3x5 cards and give them to an ordinary person who does not speak Chinese. Lock the person into a room and have him follow the instructions on the cards. He will copy out Chinese characters and pass them in and out of the room through a slot. From the outside, it will appear that the Chinese room contains a fully intelligent person who speaks Chinese. The question is this: is there anyone (or anything) in the room that understands Chinese? That is, is there anything that has the mental state of
understanding Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object o ...
, or which has
conscious Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
awareness Awareness is the state of being conscious of something. More specifically, it is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some inform ...
of what is being discussed in Chinese? The man is clearly not aware. The room cannot be aware. The ''cards'' certainly are not aware. Searle concludes that the
Chinese room The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a " mind," "understanding" or "consciousness," regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was pres ...
, or ''any'' other physical symbol system, cannot have a mind. Searle goes on to argue that actual mental states and
consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
require (yet to be described) "actual physical-chemical properties of actual human brains." He argues there are special "causal properties" of
brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a v ...
s and
neuron A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. N ...
s that gives rise to
mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...
s: in his words "brains cause minds."


Related arguments: Leibniz' mill, Davis's telephone exchange, Block's Chinese nation and Blockhead

Gottfried Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathem ...
made essentially the same argument as Searle in 1714, using the thought experiment of expanding the brain until it was the size of a mill. In 1974, Lawrence Davis imagined duplicating the brain using telephone lines and offices staffed by people, and in 1978
Ned Block Ned Joel Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psych ...
envisioned the entire population of China involved in such a brain simulation. This thought experiment is called "the Chinese Nation" or "the Chinese Gym". Ned Block also proposed his
Blockhead argument Blockhead is the name of a theoretical computer system invented as part of a thought experiment by philosopher Ned Block, which appeared in a paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviorism". Block did not name the computer in the paper. Overview In ...
, which is a version of the
Chinese room The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a " mind," "understanding" or "consciousness," regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was pres ...
in which the program has been re-factored into a simple set of rules of the form "see this, do that", removing all mystery from the program.


Responses to the Chinese room

Responses to the Chinese room emphasize several different points. * The systems reply and the virtual mind reply: This reply argues that ''the system'', including the man, the program, the room, and the cards, is what understands Chinese. Searle claims that the man in the room is the only thing which could possibly "have a mind" or "understand", but others disagree, arguing that it is possible for there to be ''two'' minds in the same physical place, similar to the way a computer can simultaneously "be" two machines at once: one physical (like a
Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
) and one " virtual" (like a
word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...
). *Speed, power and complexity replies: Several critics point out that the man in the room would probably take millions of years to respond to a simple question, and would require "filing cabinets" of astronomical proportions. This brings the clarity of Searle's intuition into doubt. *Robot reply: To truly understand, some believe the Chinese Room needs eyes and hands. Hans Moravec writes: "If we could graft a robot to a reasoning program, we wouldn't need a person to provide the meaning anymore: it would come from the physical world." *Brain simulator reply: What if the program simulates the sequence of nerve firings at the synapses of an actual brain of an actual Chinese speaker? The man in the room would be simulating an actual brain. This is a variation on the "systems reply" that appears more plausible because "the system" now clearly operates like a human brain, which strengthens the intuition that there is something besides the man in the room that could understand Chinese. *Other minds reply and the epiphenomena reply: Several people have noted that Searle's argument is just a version of the
problem of other minds The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem is that knowledge of ...
, applied to machines. Since it is difficult to decide if people are "actually" thinking, we should not be surprised that it is difficult to answer the same question about machines. :A related question is whether "consciousness" (as Searle understands it) exists. Searle argues that the experience of consciousness cannot be detected by examining the behavior of a machine, a human being or any other animal.
Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...
points out that natural selection cannot preserve a feature of an animal that has no effect on the behavior of the animal, and thus consciousness (as Searle understands it) cannot be produced by natural selection. Therefore, either natural selection did not produce consciousness, or "strong AI" is correct in that consciousness can be detected by suitably designed Turing test.


Is thinking a kind of computation?

The
computational theory of mind In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of comp ...
or "
computationalism In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of c ...
" claims that the relationship between mind and brain is similar (if not identical) to the relationship between a ''running program'' (software) and a computer (hardware). The idea has philosophical roots in
Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influe ...
(who claimed reasoning was "nothing more than reckoning"),
Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
(who attempted to create a logical calculus of all human ideas), Hume (who thought perception could be reduced to "atomic impressions") and even
Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemolo ...
(who analyzed all experience as controlled by formal rules). The latest version is associated with philosophers
Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions ...
and
Jerry Fodor Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modu ...
. This question bears on our earlier questions: if the human brain is a kind of computer then computers can be both intelligent and conscious, answering both the practical and philosophical questions of AI. In terms of the practical question of AI ("Can a machine display general intelligence?"), some versions of computationalism make the claim that (as
Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influe ...
wrote): * Reasoning is nothing but reckoning. In other words, our intelligence derives from a form of ''calculation'', similar to
arithmetic Arithmetic () is an elementary part of mathematics that consists of the study of the properties of the traditional operations on numbers— addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, and extraction of roots. In the 19th ...
. This is the
physical symbol system A physical symbol system (also called a formal system) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions. The physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH ...
hypothesis discussed above, and it implies that artificial intelligence is possible. In terms of the philosophical question of AI ("Can a machine have mind, mental states and consciousness?"), most versions of
computationalism In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of c ...
claim that (as
Stevan Harnad Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist based in Montreal, Canada. Education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McG ...
characterizes it): * Mental states are just implementations of (the right) computer programs. This is John Searle's "strong AI" discussed above, and it is the real target of the
Chinese room The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a " mind," "understanding" or "consciousness," regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was pres ...
argument (according to Harnad).


Other related questions


Can a machine have emotions?

If "
emotions Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...
" are defined only in terms of their effect on
behavior Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...
or on how they
function Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system * Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-oriente ...
inside an organism, then emotions can be viewed as a mechanism that an
intelligent agent In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or may use knowledge. They may be simple or c ...
uses to maximize the
utility As a topic of economics, utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or happiness as part of the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosopher ...
of its actions. Given this definition of emotion,
Hans Moravec Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on ...
believes that "robots in general will be quite emotional about being nice people".Quoted in Fear is a source of urgency. Empathy is a necessary component of good
human computer interaction Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, an ...
. He says robots "will try to please you in an apparently selfless manner because it will get a thrill out of this positive reinforcement. You can interpret this as a kind of love."
Daniel Crevier Daniel Crevier (born 1947) is a Canadian entrepreneur and artificial intelligence and image processing researcher. He is also the author of ''AI: the Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence''. In 1974 Crevier received a Ph.D. ...
writes "Moravec's point is that emotions are just devices for channeling behavior in a direction beneficial to the survival of one's species."


Can a machine be self-aware?

"
Self-awareness In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifesty ...
", as noted above, is sometimes used by
science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
writers as a name for the essential human property that makes a character fully human.
Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
strips away all other properties of human beings and reduces the question to "can a machine be the subject of its own thought?" Can it ''think about itself''? Viewed in this way, a program can be written that can report on its own internal states, such as a
debugger A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to software testing, test and debugging, debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the pr ...
.


Can a machine be original or creative?

Turing reduces this to the question of whether a machine can "take us by surprise" and argues that this is obviously true, as any programmer can attest. He notes that, with enough storage capacity, a computer can behave in an astronomical number of different ways. It must be possible, even trivial, for a computer that can represent ideas to combine them in new ways. (
Douglas Lenat Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning p ...
's
Automated Mathematician The Automated Mathematician (AM) is one of the earliest successful Discovery system (AI research), discovery systems. It was created by Douglas Lenat in Lisp programming language, Lisp, and in 1977 led to Lenat being awarded the IJCAI Computers and ...
, as one example, combined ideas to discover new mathematical truths.)
Kaplan Kaplan may refer to: Places * Kapłań, Poland * Kaplan, Louisiana, U.S. * Kaplan Medical Center, a hospital in Rehovot, Israel * Kaplan Street, in Tel Aviv, Israel * Mount Kaplan, Antarctica * Kaplan Arena, at the College of William & Mary in W ...
and Haenlein suggest that machines can display scientific creativity, while it seems likely that humans will have the upper hand where artistic creativity is concerned. In 2009, scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the U.K's University of Cambridge designed a robot called Adam that they believe to be the first machine to independently come up with new scientific findings. Also in 2009, researchers at
Cornell Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
developed
Eureqa Eureqa is a proprietary modeling engine originally created by Cornell's Artificial Intelligence Lab and later commercialized by Nutonian, Inc. The software uses evolutionary search to determine mathematical equations that describe sets of data in ...
, a computer program that extrapolates formulas to fit the data inputted, such as finding the laws of motion from a pendulum's motion.


Can a machine be benevolent or hostile?

This question (like many others in the philosophy of artificial intelligence) can be presented in two forms. "Hostility" can be defined in terms
function Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system * Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-oriente ...
or
behavior Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...
, in which case "hostile" becomes synonymous with "dangerous". Or it can be defined in terms of intent: can a machine "deliberately" set out to do harm? The latter is the question "can a machine have conscious states?" (such as
intention Intentions are mental states in which the agent commits themselves to a course of action. Having the plan to visit the zoo tomorrow is an example of an intention. The action plan is the ''content'' of the intention while the commitment is the ''a ...
s) in another form. The question of whether highly intelligent and completely autonomous machines would be dangerous has been examined in detail by futurists (such as the
Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artific ...
). The obvious element of drama has also made the subject popular in
science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
, which has considered many differently possible scenarios where intelligent machines pose a threat to mankind; see
Artificial intelligence in fiction Artificial intelligence is a recurrent theme in science fiction, whether utopian, emphasising the potential benefits, or dystopian, emphasising the dangers. The notion of machines with human-like intelligence dates back at least to Samuel Butler' ...
. One issue is that machines may acquire the autonomy and intelligence required to be dangerous very quickly.
Vernor Vinge Vernor Steffen Vinge (; born October 2, 1944) is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singu ...
has suggested that over just a few years, computers will suddenly become thousands or millions of times more intelligent than humans. He calls this " the Singularity". He suggests that it may be somewhat or possibly very dangerous for humans. This is discussed by a philosophy called
Singularitarianism Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity ben ...
. In 2009, academics and technical experts attended a conference to discuss the potential impact of robots and computers and the impact of the hypothetical possibility that they could become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions. They discussed the possibility and the extent to which computers and robots might be able to acquire any level of autonomy, and to what degree they could use such abilities to possibly pose any threat or hazard. They noted that some machines have acquired various forms of semi-autonomy, including being able to find power sources on their own and being able to independently choose targets to attack with weapons. They also noted that some
computer virus A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a compu ...
es can evade elimination and have achieved "cockroach intelligence". They noted that
self-awareness In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifesty ...
as depicted in science-fiction is probably unlikely, but that there were other potential hazards and pitfalls.Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man
By JOHN MARKOFF, NY Times, July 26, 2009.
Some experts and academics have questioned the use of robots for military combat, especially when such robots are given some degree of autonomous functions. The US Navy has funded a report which indicates that as military robots become more complex, there should be greater attention to implications of their ability to make autonomous decisions. The President of the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...
has commissioned a study to look at this issue. They point to programs like the Language Acquisition Device which can emulate human interaction. Some have suggested a need to build "
Friendly AI Friendly artificial intelligence (also friendly AI or FAI) refers to hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests or contribute to foster the impro ...
", meaning that the advances which are already occurring with AI should also include an effort to make AI intrinsically friendly and humane.


Can a machine imitate all human characteristics?

Turing said "It is customary ... to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. ... I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set." Turing noted that there are many arguments of the form "a machine will never do X", where X can be many things, such as:
Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new. under "(5) Arguments from Various Disabilities"
Turing argues that these objections are often based on naive assumptions about the versatility of machines or are "disguised forms of the argument from consciousness". Writing a program that exhibits one of these behaviors "will not make much of an impression." All of these arguments are tangential to the basic premise of AI, unless it can be shown that one of these traits is essential for general intelligence.


Can a machine have a soul?

Finally, those who believe in the existence of a soul may argue that "Thinking is a function of man's
immortal Immortality is the ability to live forever, or eternal life. Immortal or Immortality may also refer to: Film * ''The Immortals'' (1995 film), an American crime film * ''Immortality'', an alternate title for the 1998 British film '' The Wisdom of ...
soul." Alan Turing called this "the theological objection". He writes
In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
The discussion on the topic has been reignited as a result of recent claims made by
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
's LaMDA artificial
intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
system that it is sentient and had a "
soul In many religious and philosophical traditions, there is a belief that a soul is "the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being". Etymology The Modern English noun ''soul'' is derived from Old English ''sāwol, sāwel''. The earliest attes ...
".
LaMDA LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google. The first generation was announced during the 2021 Google I/O keynote, while the second generation was a ...
(
Language Model A language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words. Given any sequence of words of length , a language model assigns a probability P(w_1,\ldots,w_m) to the whole sequence. Language models generate probabilities by training on ...
for Dialogue Applications) is an
artificial intelligence system Artificial Intelligence System (AIS) was a volunteer computing project undertaken by Intelligence Realm, Inc. with the long-term goal of simulating the human brain in real time, complete with artificial consciousness and artificial general intell ...
that creates
chatbots A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would beha ...
—AI robots designed to communicate with humans—by gathering vast amounts of text from the internet and using
algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing c ...
to respond to queries in the most fluid and natural way possible. The transcripts of conversations between scientists and LaMDA reveal that the AI system excels at this, providing answers to challenging topics about the nature of
emotions Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...
, generating
Aesop Aesop ( or ; , ; c. 620–564 BCE) was a Greek fabulist and storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as ''Aesop's Fables''. Although his existence remains unclear and no writings by him survive, numerous tales cre ...
-style fables on the moment, and even describing its alleged fears.


Views on the role of philosophy

Some scholars argue that the AI community's dismissal of philosophy is detrimental. In the ''
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
'', some philosophers argue that the role of philosophy in AI is underappreciated. Physicist
David Deutsch David Elieser Deutsch ( ; born 18 May 1953) is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of ...
argues that without an understanding of philosophy or its concepts, AI development would suffer from a lack of progress.


Conferences

The main conference series on the issue i
"Philosophy and Theory of AI"
(PT-AI), run b
Vincent C. Müller
The main bibliography on the subject, with several sub-sections, is o
PhilPapers


See also

*
AI takeover An AI takeover is a hypothetical scenario in which an artificial intelligence (AI) becomes the dominant form of intelligence on Earth, as computer programs or robots effectively take the control of the planet away from the human species. Possible ...
* Artificial brain *
Artificial consciousness Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC) or synthetic consciousness (; ), is a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The aim of the theory of artificial consciousness is to "Define that wh ...
*
Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
*
Artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
*
Artificial philosophy Artificial philosophy is a philosophical branch conceived by author Louis Molnarhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/267156955_A_Step_Beyond_AI_Artificial_Philosophy "article: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications", ResearchGat ...
*
Chatterbot A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would beha ...
*
Computational theory of mind In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of comp ...
*
Computing Machinery and Intelligence "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is a seminal paper written by Alan Turing on the topic of artificial intelligence. The paper, published in 1950 in ''Mind'', was the first to introduce his concept of what is now known as the Turing test to ...
*
Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence Hubert Dreyfus was a critic of artificial intelligence research. In a series of papers and books, including ''Alchemy and AI'' (1965), ''What Computers Can't Do'' (1972; 1979; 1992) and ''Mind over Machine'' (1986), he presented a pessimistic a ...
*
Existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the hypothesis that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in human extinction or some other unrecoverable global catastrophe. It is argued that the hum ...
* Functionalism *
Multi-agent system A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Jang, I.; Arvin, F.; Lanzon, A.,A Decentralized Cluster Formation Containment Framework fo ...
*
Philosophy of computer science The philosophy of computer science is concerned with the philosophical questions that arise within the study of computer science. There is still no common understanding of the content, aim, focus, or topic of the philosophy of computer science, des ...
*
Philosophy of information The philosophy of information (PI) is a branch of philosophy that studies topics relevant to information processing, representational system and consciousness, cognitive science, computer science, information science and information technology. ...
*
Philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
*
Physical symbol system A physical symbol system (also called a formal system) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions. The physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH ...
*
Simulated reality The simulation theory is the hypothesis that reality could be simulated—for example by quantum computer simulation—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality. It could contain conscious minds that may or may not know that they live i ...
*'' Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies'' *
Synthetic intelligence Synthetic intelligence (SI) is an alternative/opposite term for artificial intelligence emphasizing that the intelligence of machines need not be an imitation or in any way artificial; it can be a genuine form of intelligence. John Haugeland propo ...


Notes


References


References

* Adam, Alison (1989). Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. ''Routledge & CRC Press''. * Benjamin, Ruha (2019). ''Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code''. Wiley. * * , * * Bryson, Joanna (2019). The Artificial Intelligence of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Overview for Law and Regulation, 34. * * . * Crawford, Kate (2021). '' Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence''. Yale University Press. * * * * . * * * . * * Haraway, Donna (1985). ''
A Cyborg Manifesto   "A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the '' Socialist Review (US)''. In it, the concept of the cyborg represents a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "hu ...
''. * . * . * . * * . * . * Malabou, Catherine (2019). ''Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains''. (C. Shread, Trans.). Columbia University Press. * . * * * * * * * * * :''Page numbers above and diagram contents refer to the Lyceum
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
print of the article.'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Philosophy Of Artificial Intelligence Philosophy of science Philosophy of technology Philosophy of mind Open problems Articles containing video clips