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The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence concerns questions of artificial intelligence (AI) such as:
AI may be considered as a goal, an academic field of study within computer science, and as the techniques developed by such study. The philosophy of AI studies many topics that overlap with the Philosophy Of Mind . CONDITIONS FOR INTELLIGENCE The Turing Test suggests a Sufficient Condition for intelligence is the ability to converse with a human in such a way that the human is fooled into thinking the conversation is with another human. (In order to remove biases based on how the AI ''looks'', the conversation is normally imagined to take place through a medium like modern-day Instant Messaging chats.) Such a test is not a Necessary Condition ; it seems for example that ET was intelligent even if it couldn't convince anyone of this fact due to language barriers and the like. Others doubt that it is even a sufficient condition. Chatbots , for example, are learning more and more sophisticated algorithms for ''sounding'' intelligent without any actual understanding of the conversations. John Searle argues that AI is impossible in his famous Thought Experiment , the Chinese Room . Searle argues that Syntax is not sufficient for Semantics —that mere symbol manipulation, no matter how complicated, cannot provide genuine Meaning or Understanding , and that therefore no computer program can be written that in and of itself could cause a computer to think or understand. Because Searle admits that the human brain is essentially a computer, he does not go so far as to say that it is impossible to build a computer that could have semantics, but only so far as to say that such a computer would have to have physical causality similar to that of the human brainSearle, John R. Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program? Scientific American, January 1990, 26-31. Searle essentially sees computer programs as sets of syntactic rules, and argues that since no computer program could ever duplicate the physical causality of the human brain, strong AI's approach of programming computers to behave like people is futile. Most professional philosophers in the area believe that Searle failed to establish that AI is impossible, but there is disagreement about exactly what is wrong with his argument, with the Systems Reply, Robot Reply, and Brain Simulator Reply being among the objections.http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm STRONG AI VS. WEAK AI See Also: Strong AI vs. Weak AI This debate argues that some forms of artificial intelligence can truly reason and solve problems. While such critics as John Lucas , Hubert Dreyfus , Joseph Weizenbaum and Terry Winograd denies the possibility, strong AI defenders like Daniel Dennett , Marvin Minsky , Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil claim that it is possible for computers to become sapient. ETHICAL ISSUES There are many ethical problems associated with working to create intelligent creatures.
A major influence in the AI ethics dialogue was Isaac Asimov who, at the insistence of his editor John W. Campbell Jr. , proposed the Three Laws Of Robotics to govern artificial intelligent systems. Much of his work was then spent testing the boundaries of his three laws to see where they would break down, or where they would create paradoxical or unanticipated behavior. Ultimately, a reading of his work concludes that no set of fixed laws can sufficiently match the possible behavior of AI agents and human society. A criticism of Asimov's robot laws is that the installation of unalterable laws into a sentient consciousness would be a limitation of Free Will and therefore unethical. Consequently, Asimov's robot laws would be restricted to explicitly non-sentient machines, which possibly could not be made to reliably understand them under all possible circumstances. The movie The Thirteenth Floor suggests a future where simulated worlds with sentient inhabitants are created by computer Game Console s for the purpose of entertainment. The movie The Matrix suggests a future where the dominant species on planet Earth are sentient machines and humanity is treated with utmost Speciesism . The short story The Planck Dive suggest a future where humanity has turned itself into software that can be duplicated and optimized and the relevant distinction between types of software is sentient and non-sentient. The same idea can be found in the Emergency Medical Hologram of Starship Voyager , which is an apparently sentient copy of a reduced subset of the consciousness of its creator, Dr. Zimmerman , who, for the best motives, has created the system to give medical assistance in case of emergencies. The movies Bicentennial Man and A.I. deal with the possibility of sentient robots that could love. I, Robot explored some aspects of Asimov's three laws. All these scenarios try to foresee possibly unethical consequences of the creation of sentient computers. Over time, debates have tended to focus less and less on ''possibility'' and more on ''desirability'', as emphasized in the "Cosmist" and "Terran" debates initiated by Hugo De Garis and Kevin Warwick . A Cosmist, according to Hugo de Garis, is actually seeking to build more intelligent successors to the human species. EXPECTATIONS OF AI AI methods are often employed in . This goal is unlikely to be met in the near future and is no longer the subject of most serious AI research. The label "AI" has something of a bad name due to the failure of these early expectations, and aggravation by various popular science writers and media personalities such as Professor Kevin Warwick whose work has raised the expectations of AI research far beyond its current capabilities. For this reason, many AI researchers say they work in Cognitive Science , Informatics , Statistical Inference or Information Engineering . Recent research areas include Bayesian Network s and Artificial Life . The vision of artificial intelligence replacing human professional judgment has arisen many times in the history of the field, and today in some specialized areas where " Expert System s" are routinely used to augment or to replace professional judgment in some areas of engineering and of medicine. REFERENCES SEE ALSO
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