Artificial Intelligence Philosophy

According to Russell & Norvig, Turing makes the claim that “human behavior is far too complex to be captured by any formal set of rules.”

humans must be using some informal guidelines that (the argument claims) could never be captured in a formal set of rules and thus could never be codified in a computer program

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, chapter 27, page 981

Of course, good old fashioned AI is very inefficient at dealing with such ill-defined problems, but deep learning has brought us advances in areas from games to languages, and it seems all encompassing at this point. In the era of ChatGPT I think that the later mentioned embodied cognition approach is more important.

Strong and weak agents

Of course, everything I’ve talked about so far assumes you know what a weak and a strong agent is. Or at least maybe you’ve heard of this concept before?

Weak Artificial Intelligence	Strong Artificial Intelligence
are machines that only act as if they are intelligent.	are machines that actually are intelligent, not just simulating.

Something that surprised me when I took my introduction to artificial intelligence course during the COVID-19 pandemic was when our professor quizzed the whole class over Zoom about which belief students subscribed to: could or could there not be an artificial intelligence? The results, the professor explained as is the case for most classes, were evenly divided: a 50/50 split on the subject!

This question can be extended to nearly everything. Would a sufficiently large neural network (brain) trained to be an artist actually be considered an artist? For instance, if I ask that agent to give me an artistic rendition of a “A robot sitting at a computer desk in the style of a vincent van gogh painting,” can that be considered art?

I mean, Vincent Van Gogh has no conception of what a robot is, so this could only either be an artistic rendition or something else.

Of course, one of the more interesting things about Vincent Van Gogh is that he is a human with a story and he evolves over time. Machines, at the current moment, cannot do the same. For instance, Vincent Van Gogh used to paint with significantly more desaturated color tones in 1833, versus when he later moved to Paris and underwent personal evolutions that ultimately led to his artwork that is so critically acclaimed today.