Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Last Update: Friday, 22 November 2024 |
Note 1: Many of these items are online; links are given where they are known. Other items may also be online; an internet search should help you find them.
Note 2: In general, works are listed in chronological order.
(This makes it easier to follow the historical development of ideas.)
§18.1: Introduction
Further Reading on the Philosophy of AI:
§18.2: What Is AI?:
For discussion of this question of what AI (and CS) is, see the
Further Readings for §4.11
§18.2.2: Artificial Intelligence as Computational Cognition:
(As cited in
Gonçalves, Bernardo (2022),
"Can Machines Think?
The Controversy that Led to the Turing Test",
AI & Society, §7.)
and there are AI-related discussions in:
§18.3: The Turing Test:
On HAL, see:
§18.3.2: The Imitation Game:
§18.3.3: Thinking vs. "Thinking"
For more on flying vs. "flying" (and swimming vs. "swimming"), see:
§18.4: Digression: The "Lovelace Objection":
§18.5: Digression: Turing on Intelligent Machinery:
§18.6: The Chinese Room Argument:
as well as an assumption that begs the question of whether the algorithm
(or anything else affiliated with the Room) really does "understand".
I should have said that the rule book is a complete
natural-language-processing algorithm for Chinese.
§18.8.2: Which Premise [of Searle's Chinese Room Argument] Is at Fault?
§18.8.3: Semiotics:
§18.8.4: Points of View
"… an entity is said to be intelligent (or to think) only if we respond
to it
in a certain way" (Proudfoot 2013, p.397)
§18.8.5: A Recursive Theory of Understanding
§18.9: Leibniz's Mill and Turing's "Strange Inversion":
§18.10: A Better Way:
On what might be in the Chinese Room rulebook, see:
Akman, V. (2000), Introduction to the special issue on philosophical
foundations of artificial intelligence, Journal
of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence
12(3):247–250.
What does 'AI' mean?
A recent article in The New Yorker discussed the use of "AI" in the
discovery of new antibiotics. But what they really meant was the use of
neural networks.
Now, neural networks, of course, were a development of AI research.
But if 'AI' is
understood as the branch of CS that is concerned with the computability of
cognition, it's not obvious that antibiotic discovery is really AI.
On the other hand, Denning's 1985 list of CS contributions didn't give many to
AI, yet many of the contributions of other branches of CS originally came
from AI. So should they really be called 'AI'?
Currently, 'AI' has become a term referring primarily to neural-network
technology, and even more recently primarily to large-language-model (LLM)
technology.
And in 2024, Hopcroft and Hinton won the Nobel for physics!
And Demis Hassabis won for chemistry!!
"Their research would be directed to finding the degree of
intellectual activity of which a machine was capable, and to what extent
it could think for itself."
Rapaport, W.J. (2005c). Review of Shieber 2004.
Computational Linguistics, 31(3):407–412
See also:
Rapaport, W.J. (2006c). Review of Preston and Bishop 2002.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84(1):129–133.
§18.7: The Argument from Biology
I said that Searle assumes that computers have no links to the external
world. What about interactive computing, as we discussed in §11.8?
"… whether or not machines think is in part determined by social
environment, in the form of the interrogator's responses" (Proudfoot 2005)
For more on this interpretation, see:
"the failure of experts to distinguish
between imitations and the real thing should not be taken as much more than
a statement of the
competence of the experts."
Dennett (in the quotation on p. 432) talks about an "Intentionally
characterized problem". That sounds like the "G" of §16.5's
formulation "To accomplish goal G, do algorithm A". So, perhaps
"To G, do A" could be called an "Intentionally characterized
solution". In Dennett's "reduc[tion] to functionaries 'who can be
replaced by a machine'", what happens to "G"?
"A good theory of consciousness should make a conscious mind look
lika an abandoned factory (recall Leibniz's mill), full of humming
machinery and nobody home to supervise it, or enjoy it, or witness it.
…
I don't maintain, of course, that human consciousness doesn't exist; I
maintain that it is not what people often think it is."
— Dennett, Daniel C. (2005), Sweet Dreams: Philosophical
Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press),
pp. 70–71.
Copyright © 2023--2024 by
William J. Rapaport
(rapaport@buffalo.edu)
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/OR/A0fr18.html-20241122