A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver,and a bee puts to shame many an architect
in the construction of her cells.
But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is this:
that the architect raises his structure
in imagination before he erects it in reality.
Karl Marx.
On the first pages of most artificial intelligence books, or on the first sentences of an introductory lecture on AI, a question is asked: What is intelligence?
We take for granted that we know the answer to an equally, if not more important, question: what does "artificial" mean?
I am not alone, I know, in thinking that the route to AI begins not with answering the first question, posed at least two thousand years ago, but rather with a systematic and intrepid quest for an answer of the second one.
Allow me, dear reader, to put forth this three questions, your answers of which I would really like to hear of.
What does artificial mean for you?
Where is the boundary between artificial and natural?
What do you think will happen as science approaches this boundary and clears the mist that makes it look so fuzzy?
There is a halo of mysticism surrounding the understanding of the concepts of intelligence, mind, creativity, etc. (and not only those, also social phenomena, and until recently, life itself). That idealism of which Russell was such a stern enemy is still around us, pushing us into the arrogant position of thinking that there is something in intelligence unattainable by objects not humane.
This idealism is manifest in our invention of the word artificial, and the common use we give to it. This idea, that the processes in which human intelligence intervenes are somehow different from those in which it is absent, is arrogant in it self. But this arrogance is not intentional in each human individual, but rather a common trait of our culture, in which the ignorance of the physical processes leading to that which we call intelligence, is taken as a sign that something metaphysical lies behind the mind.
This is a tempting position for it is easy to reconcile it with our sensation of self-consciousness, with our ability to recognize ourselves apart from other things. But it is also a dangerous position, for we tend to interpret it as the supremacy of men over all earthly things.
This arrogant position can be interpreted as the successor of vitalism, an idea long-abandoned in science yet still present in the layman. Science, at least, must get rid of this absurd idealism in order to advance not only in the field of AI, but in every other field of science in which interesting phenomena seem to come out of nowhere.
We take for granted that we know the answer to an equally, if not more important, question: what does "artificial" mean?
I am not alone, I know, in thinking that the route to AI begins not with answering the first question, posed at least two thousand years ago, but rather with a systematic and intrepid quest for an answer of the second one.
Allow me, dear reader, to put forth this three questions, your answers of which I would really like to hear of.
What does artificial mean for you?
Where is the boundary between artificial and natural?
What do you think will happen as science approaches this boundary and clears the mist that makes it look so fuzzy?
There is a halo of mysticism surrounding the understanding of the concepts of intelligence, mind, creativity, etc. (and not only those, also social phenomena, and until recently, life itself). That idealism of which Russell was such a stern enemy is still around us, pushing us into the arrogant position of thinking that there is something in intelligence unattainable by objects not humane.
This idealism is manifest in our invention of the word artificial, and the common use we give to it. This idea, that the processes in which human intelligence intervenes are somehow different from those in which it is absent, is arrogant in it self. But this arrogance is not intentional in each human individual, but rather a common trait of our culture, in which the ignorance of the physical processes leading to that which we call intelligence, is taken as a sign that something metaphysical lies behind the mind.
This is a tempting position for it is easy to reconcile it with our sensation of self-consciousness, with our ability to recognize ourselves apart from other things. But it is also a dangerous position, for we tend to interpret it as the supremacy of men over all earthly things.
This arrogant position can be interpreted as the successor of vitalism, an idea long-abandoned in science yet still present in the layman. Science, at least, must get rid of this absurd idealism in order to advance not only in the field of AI, but in every other field of science in which interesting phenomena seem to come out of nowhere.
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