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Comment by golol | Hacker News Reader

Intelligence has a pretty clear meaning. Of course you will have a hard time nailing down a definition but that's also true for simple words like "chair" or "car".

Artificial intelligence is also a pretty good name for a pretty clear concept: intelligence that has been artificially created. Any new ambiguity here comes from the ambiguity inherent in the word "artificial". Artifivial intelligence has a large range from if/else, linear regression and decision trees over ML methods to god-like superintelligence. That is not a problem, I think it's good that we have a term for this. I don't like when people try to reduce artificial intelligence to a smaller subset of these things. We should certainly come up with more precise terms in addition, but I think artificial intelligence is a very useful terminology and concept, not a marketing term.

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> Any new ambiguity here comes from the ambiguity inherent in the word "artificial".

Not sure I agree here. Seems to me the ambiguity comes from the word "intelligence". As in, does that if/else clause indicate "intelligence" that's been programmed in. Of course we've created more terms like Artificial General Intelligence[1] to try to clear up the muddy definition of what constitutes intelligence.

I think our fundamental challenge as society begins to try to understand what AI is comes down to what "intelligence" is. As you said, we all know what it is, but can't define it easily. If I write some really clever code, is the system running it intelligent? Is some of my intelligence imbued into that system, or does it have some of its own? At what point does a stochastic process approach intelligence - when it has enough data? Does that mean babies aren't born with intelligence, but acquire it as they learn more? So many questions, good questions, necessary questions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

> does that if/else clause indicate "intelligence" that's been programmed in

Yes, systems built with if/else rules are intelligent, in that they reproduce some heuristic rule that someone had to think about. I think the term "expert system" is kind of appropriate for them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

Of course they are not too intelligent, but, they are more intelligent than a rock, say. (unless this rock happen to be a chip running some neural network)

Agree fully - I've always used the term "expert system" as well, for the same distinction. An expert system operates on rules, created by a more "creatively intelligent" entity.

Though when we talk about AI now, we are talking about what the _public_ thinks "intelligence" means. This really muddies the conversation, because these technical distinctions we are making now fall completely flat. I think when you tell random people that we have created "artificial intelligence", they think we mean what I am referring to above as "creative intelligence", not "it executes an if/else rule" intelligent. So as AI becomes a topic in the mainstream, our conversations are likely to be completely misunderstood because of the colloquial meaning of the technical terms we use.

I have been working in human and artificial intelligence for several years now. It is not at all apparent to me that intelligence has a clear meaning.

I think the definitional problem is significant, but the problem is even more fundamental than that. A couple of years ago, I witnessed a heated disagreement at a conference about whether intelligence required learning or not.

Does intelligence require embodiment? Perception? Sensation? Agency? Intentionality? Cognition? Metacognition? Other higher cognitive/executive functions?

These concepts are not just to embellish the definition a bit. They are fundamental to what intelligence is.

A plausible definition you could find in a journal article might be: An embodied agent that can intentionally solve problems using information obtained from the external environment plus introspection, by way of various executive functions, and then affect the external environment accordingly.

Some philosophers and researchers would agree, and some would disagree, because of what they each think intelligence is.

> but I think artificial intelligence is a very useful terminology and concept, not a marketing term.

I agree that the term is fine. But it is absolutely also used as a nonsense marketing term. ChatGPT or one of the other OpenAI models was calling itself an "advanced AI system" or some such bullshit. The term itself is not to blame, but people definitely (mis)use it that way.

Why does there have to be one specific combination of these aspects that yields the one, true "intelligence"? The truth is that it is simply an extremely extremely broad spectrum. Any agent that performs useful computations can be argued to be intelligent in some way. It does not make sense to argue endlessly in an attempt to lift this lower bound. Let's just acknowledge that slime molds, bacteria and NPCs have some form of intelligence so we can move on and define more specific and useful types of intelligences: Embodied intelligence, social intelligence, learning intelligence, general intelligence etc. Of course these will always be vague spectra, as nailing anything clearly down is extremely technical.

Organizing things in sets is nice and all, but it is usually ill-defined on the boundaries and when it leads to endless discussions it's better to just think in terms of functionals. Some abstract functional tells you how intelligent, how embodied or how learning a certain agent is, according to some scale.

I'd strongly disagree that intelligence has a clear meaning. Depending on who you ask, you can get answers anywhere from "slime molds are intelligent" (they can hunt for food, solve mazes, etc) to "only humans are intelligent".

But would anyone disagree with "humans are more intelligent than slime molds"? This feels like a re-hash of the argument discussed in the article.

The problem with human intelligence is saying 'if a human can do it, it is intelligence' doesn't break down the problem space correctly. It also leaves potential gaps where a system could have a form of intelligence humans do not leading to humans misjudging that systems capabilities abd that could lead to disaster (common AI risk scenario).

Reminds me of the book “Other Minds”, where the author discusses consciousness in octopuses.

Most people you ask aren't going to have an opinion that is worth voicing even if they do happen to voice it. People love to think in binary, yes/no situations, but reality isn't kind enough to present many of those in complex situations. Instead most systems live in a gradient. Sorties paradox becomes our primary means of argument and not a varying set of classification systems that break down the different pieces that belong to systems that have intelligence.

Myself, I consider both examples intelligent, but one has vastly more capabilities.

> Intelligence has a pretty clear meaning.

Come on. We did this already, almost certainly long before you were born. Even the instrumentalists don't like it!

This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think’. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll.

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