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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

The philosophy side of the matter seems meaningless, it interrogates the meaning of language, not the capabilities of technology. When people ask "Could machines think?" the question isn't really about machines, it's about precisely what we mean by the word 'think'.

Can a submarine swim? Who cares! What's important is that a submarine can do what a submarine does. Whether or not the action of a submarine fits the meaning of the word 'swim' should be irrelevant to anybody except poets.

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The people who designed the first submarines had relatively specific engineering problems and applications in mind. They could bypass any philosophical interrogation of the word "swim" because they didn't define the problem as swimming and didn't need to.

"AGI" isn't like that. Nobody really knows what it means, and it's impossible to get down to brass tacks until you choose a problem definition. When philosophers point out the conspicuous lack of clarity here, they're doing us a service.

When the industry settled on marketing any application of deep learning as "AI," "AGI" became the terminological heir to the same set of ill-defined grandiose expectations that used to be "AI."

Choose a better-specified problem and you can ignore philosophical problems about words like "intelligence." The same choice will also excuse you from the competition to convince people that you have produced "AGI."

Then let's define the problem as passing a rigorous Turing Test. And by rigorous I mean one lasting several days conducted by a jury of 12 tenured professors drawn from multiple academic fields including philosophy, mathematics, history, computer science, neuroscience, psychology, law, etc.

But a submarine doing what a submarine does is a tautology. What people are really grasping at is can a machine be human? And pinning down what it means to be human seems very important to ruminate on. Can machines think? Cogito, ergo sum...

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