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Comment by Digit-Al | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we are that close to creating artificial intelligence for a very simple reason.

To solve a problem you must first be able to define the problem to be solved. So, define intelligence. Take your time, this comment will wait for you. Done? Good. Now define it in a way that everyone else agrees with and that doesn't fall to pieces under scrutiny.

Philosophers have been trying this for thousands of years and are still no closer to an answer. As far as I can tell we don't have any test for intelligence that is good enough to establish, for absolute certainty, that another human being is 'intelligent' let alone anything else.

Define the problem and the requirements to consider the problem solved and only then do we have any hope of coming up with a solution.

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Well, this seems to be the definition Deepmind uses: https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 . And there has been work to establish a quantitative measure of the extent to which an agents behavior is intelligent or mechanical: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12387 .

Thanks for sharing such interesting papers!

May I ask what makes you think that the first paper has Deepmind's definition of intelligence? Was it said so by Deepmind at some point?

Shane Legg, one of the authors of the paper, is also the co-founder of Deepmind and it is cited in several of their papers. There are some old videos of him discussing it here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL985E81376A4D061E .

I agree with you but for a different reason. In some other sense you don't need to define intelligence. You can assume humans are intellugent and collect data as to how behave and cross validate your machine's bahevior with that. This should include talking, walking, feeling, problem solving, convincing etc... except in a simulated world.

My thoughts are:

Intelligence is not an algorithm.

Intelligence is a criteria for which many assorted algorithms may be judged.

The criteria is making an improbable outcome - more probable.

Any process, biological, mechanical or electronic - that results in narrowing the search space is exhibiting intelligence.

Consciousness is not intelligence - it's a feature of biological life that is frequently conflated with intelligence because we have both. No amount of computational power or data creates an emergent consciousness.

From a practical point of view you can look at reproducing the mental skills of humans. Some things computers have got quite good at - go, chess and face recognition for instance. Others like common sense and figuring what people are up to, not so much. It's not so much a single thing as a set of abilities.

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