Is Strong AI Possible?

The ongoing success of applied AI and of cognitive simulation, seems assured. However, strong AI that is, artificial intelligence that aims to duplicate human intellectual abilities remains controversial. Exaggerated claims of success, in professional journals as well as the popular press, have damaged its reputation. At the present time even an embodied system displaying the overall intelligence of a cockroach is proving elusive, let alone a system that can rival a human being. The difficulty of scaling up AI’s modest achievements cannot be overstated. Five decades of research in symbolic AI have failed to produce any firm evidence that a symbol system can manifest human levels of general intelligence; connectionists are unable to model the nervous systems of even the simplest invertebrates; and critics of nouvelle AI regard as simply mystical the view that high-level behaviors involving language understanding, planning, and reasoning will somehow emerge from the interaction of basic behaviors such as obstacle avoidance, gaze control, and object manipulation.

However, this lack of substantial progress may simply be testimony to the difficulty of strong AI, not to its impossibility. Let us turn to the very idea of strong artificial intelligence. Can a computer possibly think? Noam Chomsky suggests that debating this question is pointless, for it is an essentially arbitrary decision whether to extend common usage of the word think to include machines. There is, Chomsky claims, no factual question as to whether any such decision is right or wrong just as there is no question as to whether our decision to say that airplanes fly is right, or our decision not to say that ships swim is wrong. However, this seems to oversimplify matters. The important question is, Could it ever be appropriate to say that computers think, and, if so, what conditions must a computer satisfy in order to be so described?

Some authors offer the Turing test as a definition of intelligence. However, Turing himself pointed out that a computer that ought to be described as intelligent might nevertheless fail his test if it were incapable of successfully imitating a human being. For example, why should an intelligent robot designed to oversee mining on the Moon necessarily be able to pass itself off in conversation as a human being? If an intelligent entity can fail the test, then the test cannot function as a definition of intelligence. It is even questionable whether passing the test would actually show that a computer is intelligent, as the information theorist Claude Shannon and the AI pioneer John McCarthy pointed out in 1956. Shannon and McCarthy argued that it is possible, in principle, to design a machine containing a complete set of canned responses to all the questions that an interrogator could possibly ask during the fixed time span of the test. Like Parry, this machine would produce answers to the interviewer’s questions by looking up appropriate responses in a giant table. This objection seems to show that in principle a system with no intelligence at all could pass the Turing test.

In fact, AI has no real definition of intelligence to offer, not even in the subhuman case. Rats are intelligent, but what exactly must an artificial intelligence achieve before researchers can claim this level of success? In the absence of a reasonably precise criterion for when an artificial system counts as intelligent, there is no objective way of telling whether an AI research program has succeeded or failed. One result of AI’s failure to produce a satisfactory criterion of intelligence is that, whenever researchers achieve one of AI’s goals for example, a program that can summarize newspaper articles or beat the world chess champion critics are able to say “That’s not intelligence!” Marvin Minsky’s response to the problem of defining intelligence is to maintain like Turing before him that intelligence is simply our name for any problem-solving mental process that we do not yet understand. Minsky likens intelligence to the concept “unexplored regions of Africa”: it disappears as soon as we discover it.

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