I think what this conversation is dancing around is that we have a colloquial definition of “Artificial Intelligence”, inherited from science fiction and broadly (albeit with much specific variation) understood as “conscious machine”…
…and then we have a set of computer programs that are - fundamentally - no different from any other program (one Turing machine can, in principle, run all the same algorithms as any other Turing machine). Yes, we can technically describe these programs with the words “artificial” and “intelligent”, but doing so is kind of disingenuous, given the cultural association that predates any use of the term in comp sci fields.
totally different conversation, but its also a fun one:
Even if we were delusional enough to think life came from non-life and developed intelligence by random chance and natural selection
yeah I won’t discount the possibility that life has other origins. At the same time, you gotta deal with Occam’s Razor: working with what we currently know about the history of the planet, life emerging from non-life requires fewer assumptions. It also cannot be discounted as a possibility.
We don’t have a mathematical definition for intelligence or artificial like we do for a Turing machine, but most useful concepts don’t have precise definitions, like human, air, porn, drugs, medicine. I don’t see how there is anything disingenuous about calling computer programs artificially intelligent because that same term describes sci-fi computer programs which display intelligence. A lot of robots in sci-fi aren’t superintelligent and they usually have robotic voices and vocabulary choices and sometimes difficulty understanding words that aren’t in the dictionary or answering slightly vague questions, things which LLMs have no trouble with.
Saying the mount Rushmore carvings was formed by erosion is a simple explanation with few assumptions that is possible if you assume erosion happens sufficiently randomly, but it’s an absurd explanation nonetheless. Occam’s razor is just a rule of thumb to apply to competing explanations which are similarly reasonable and even then it’s not telling you which is more likely to be true but which is the simplest model to work with.
I think what this conversation is dancing around is that we have a colloquial definition of “Artificial Intelligence”, inherited from science fiction and broadly (albeit with much specific variation) understood as “conscious machine”…
…and then we have a set of computer programs that are - fundamentally - no different from any other program (one Turing machine can, in principle, run all the same algorithms as any other Turing machine). Yes, we can technically describe these programs with the words “artificial” and “intelligent”, but doing so is kind of disingenuous, given the cultural association that predates any use of the term in comp sci fields.
totally different conversation, but its also a fun one:
yeah I won’t discount the possibility that life has other origins. At the same time, you gotta deal with Occam’s Razor: working with what we currently know about the history of the planet, life emerging from non-life requires fewer assumptions. It also cannot be discounted as a possibility.
We don’t have a mathematical definition for intelligence or artificial like we do for a Turing machine, but most useful concepts don’t have precise definitions, like human, air, porn, drugs, medicine. I don’t see how there is anything disingenuous about calling computer programs artificially intelligent because that same term describes sci-fi computer programs which display intelligence. A lot of robots in sci-fi aren’t superintelligent and they usually have robotic voices and vocabulary choices and sometimes difficulty understanding words that aren’t in the dictionary or answering slightly vague questions, things which LLMs have no trouble with.
Saying the mount Rushmore carvings was formed by erosion is a simple explanation with few assumptions that is possible if you assume erosion happens sufficiently randomly, but it’s an absurd explanation nonetheless. Occam’s razor is just a rule of thumb to apply to competing explanations which are similarly reasonable and even then it’s not telling you which is more likely to be true but which is the simplest model to work with.