There is no singular, unanimously accepted definition of artificial intelligence. This is to be expected since there is no singular, unanimously accepted definition of intelligence. In fact, most books about these topics, when dealing with the task of defining them, make this very assertion. They then go on to quote multiple scientists and revolutionaries who took a stand on their opinions. To be careful, the authors of these books cover the range of opinions, then they settle on one opinion because it is necessary to the purpose of the book.
For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to go into a wide range of opinions. (For a wide range, see the Wikipedia post for Artificial intelligence or go directly to Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-790395-2 ) Instead, I’m going to tell you what I think and which authors and scientists have influenced my own opinion.
First, intelligence is an organism’s ability to learn about, respond to and predict about changes in its environment (See Hawkins, J. On Intelligence, Time Books, 2004.)
Now, I’m sure I’ve already upset some people. I already feel the thousands of objections and questions beating down my door. This is also to be expected. These are bold, wide-reaching statements. Many organisms are covered under this concept. Intelligence is not the exclusive property of Man (or Beast). Intelligence doesn’t come about strictly because of the neo-cortex. Yes, Dorothy, things aren’t black and white. There are shades of gray in this universe and intelligence is one of them.
In On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins describes a memory-prediction framework for describing what we, as humans, generally call thinking. In short, the main idea is that bottom-up sensory inputs are matched against stored patterns which, in turn, provide a top-down prediction in the form of neural potentiation. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-prediction_framework ) The book goes into great depth about this framework, provides a basis for thinking about how the brain works and answers a great many questions.
In following this model, we accept that there are three parts to intelligence:
- Ability to learn
- Ability to respond to
- Ability to predict
If we accept this, then we must also accept that intelligence exists on a continuum.
I’ll let you digest this for now. In the next post, we’ll go into why I think this way, what some objections to these concepts are and what the implications of this concept are for computer science and the field of artificial intelligence.
sneak peek: Second Idea – There is no such thing as artificial intelligence.
Facebook is an interesting tool. Specifically, this status update element got me thinking about things in context-aware computing. On the one hand, wouldn’t it be interesting to update your Facebook status automatically in some cases? (privacy concerns notwithstanding) Wouldn’t it also be interesting to see how providing explicit status updates could assist computers in providing resources to you?