>> They certainly do a lot of the things brains do. Lest we forget,
"calculator" was once a job title. My understanding of AI as field is that the
point of it all is exactly to figure out how to do on the machine the stuff
brains can do that still eludes us.
There isn't really any one "point of it all" for AI. If you ask different
people, they'll tell you different things. Some want to replicate human
intelligence, which may mean replicating the function of the brain; or not,
because maybe we can make a machine behave like a human without it functioning
like a brain. Some just want to make computers not stupid. Others
want to get computers to exhibit human-like behaviour on a computer in order
to understand human-like behaviour in humans.
For example, many of the pioneers of AI (Turing, Shannon, McCarthy, Michie,
etc) were interested in chess and board game-playing AI because they thought
that a computer playing chess like a human, would tell us something about how
humans play chess. And that, in turn would tell us something about how humans
think, because it's obvious that humans play chess by thinking about chess
(and who knows what else).
It turns out that it's not necessary to think like a human, or to think at
all, to play a game or chess, or at least to calculate the best move given a
board position. We now have systems that can do it, and that can beat any
human in chess. Yet those systems are based on specialised algorithms for
board-game playing, that work nothing like humans do with their minds when we
play chess, because no human plays chess by "running" alpha-beta minimax and
Monte Carlo Tree Search in their head. And so those systems still tell us
nothing about how humans play chess, or how humans think (McCarthy was really
pissed off about that and he wrote an article blasting the state of AI chess
research when Deep Blue beat Kasparov).
And that's because digital computers, and human brains, or human minds, are
nothing like each other. So being able to do one thing with a computer tells
us nothing about doing that thing with a human brain or mind, and vice-versa.
Which btw also means that we can't really look at human behaviour, and predict
from it computer behaviour, just because we see some behaviour in a computer
that looks superficially like human behaviour. There is always the question of
what the computer is really doing, and whether it is at all like what the
human is doing, and the answer to that is, so far, a resounding: no.
And because of all of the above, we learn nothing by simply trying to match
ideas and concepts, and reuse terms, that we use to talk about computers, to
talk about humans, and the other way around. In turn, when terminology is used
in such a free-wheeling manner as in the article above, we learn nothing,
because it means nothing. "Recursion" is a thing in computers. It's a
different thing in humans. It's clear that the author is trying to do the
computer-thing of recursion, but it's also clear they're not doing that, at
all. And if they were trying to do "recursion" as in humans, then it's clear
they're not doing that, either, because they're trying to do it like we do it
in computers. So all the author's done is fudge some terminology, bodge
together some code and call it "recursion", and achieve nothing but brief
internet fame. But I suspect that was the only motivation.
>> I don't think its terribly important that "the model can't do any
computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device."
For me that's the whole point because the only model we have of what minds do
is computational. And the only justification anyone can really give for AI,
whatever they are trying to achieve with it, is that brains are like
computers, minds are like programs, and a Universal Turing Machine can run any
program that can be run on any other computing machine, so it should be
possible to run the mind-program on a computer-brain.
Which we still don't know how to do in practice. We might not have the right
theory of computation. Or we may not have the right kind of computer. Or we
may even not have the right kind of mind, or brain. We'll know when we know,
if we ever do.