Artificial Intelligence (Reading11-lgrazios)

From the readings Artificial Intelligence is a new field in computer science that seeks to develop computers and computer programs that can perform things and tasks that are usually done by humans, usually things thought of as humans acting intelligently. This is a very broad definition as the reading points out, because considering this definition you could say that a calculator is an AI since it does mathematical computations that are usually done by humans. And in a way it is true but maybe AI has more to do when computers and software reasons and makes choices intelligently as humans do. So for example, how AlphaGo plays Go, Deep Blue plays chess or Watson Jeopardy. These are all interesting tricks and gimmicks of some sort but they also show that these machines can think and reason, and therefore they are proof of the viability of artificial intelligence according to that definition. Regardless of how they can only do that one cool thing it doesn’t take credit from them at all. I believe that is a great start to AIs, besides since a lot of people fear AIs taking over the world, having AIs that con only do one thing and do it right is the best way to prevent this fear. What harm can come from an expert chess, Go or Jeopardy playing AI. But also you might wonder what good comes out of it. I don’t really know. But it is a good start; maybe we can later develop machines that can do all sorts of useful stuff. For example another AI mentioned in the reading was Iamus, the music composing AI, it is really cool and maybe still not the most useful AI but it is progress, which I think is really cool. I think the Chinese Room is a good counter argument to the Turing test, because it you can measure intelligence from a 5 minute conversation. It is true you can learn a lot from a 5 minute conversation, but I don’t think it really proves a lot about intelligence, even if you consider the alterations of the Turing test used to test other AI, you can notice that those test prove a certain level of intelligence but only in a certain field or aspect. Similar to what the Chinese Room says about how the computer doesn’t actually understand what it is saying or doing, it is merely following the instructions that the programmer coded it. Just as memorizing material for a test doesn’t prove comprehension of the subject. I believe that maybe someday well be able to create computing system that can be considered a mind, but in order to reach that point we are going to have to understand how our minds work, and that would probably lead to a different hardware design or something of that sort that will in turn allow us to create computer systems that could be considered minds.