Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Why do people call is "Artificial Intelligence" when it could be called "Statistical Model for Choosing Data"?

"Intelligence" implies "thinking" for most people, just as "Learning" in machine learning implies "understanding" for most people. The algorithms created neither 'think' nor 'understand' and until you understand that, it may be difficult to accurately judge the value of the results produced by these systems.

View on HN

If we say “artificial flavoring”, we have a sense that it is an emulation of something real, and often a poor one.

Why, when we use the term for AI, do we skip over this distinction and expect it to be as good as the original—- or better?

That wouldn’t be artificial intelligence, it would just be the original artifact: “intelligence”.

Actually I think the name is apt. It's artificial. It's like how an "artificial banana" isn't actually a banana. It doesn't have to be real thinking or real learning, it just has to look intelligent (which it does).

The term was coined in 1955 to describe "learning or any other feature of intelligence" simulated by a machine [1]. The same proposal does list using natural language as one of the aspects of "the artificial intelligence problem"

It's not a perfect term, but we have been using it for seven full decades to include all of machine learning and plenty of things even less intelligent

1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...

How do you feel about Business Intelligence as a term?

Same way I feel about 'Military Intelligence' :-). Both of those phrases use the 'information gathering and analysis' definition of intelligence rather than the 'thinking' definition.

Like the old saying:

Military justice is to justice as military music is to music

Reply on news.ycombinator.com