I'm still not comfortable calling the thing that is booming "artificial intelligence". It is mostly pattern recognition and classification. Intelligence is something else.
ISTM you may have found the answer to TFA's question. In the early days of AI, they were looking for actual intelligence. Eventually everyone realized that won't be found soon. Today's success is mostly a successful refocusing on attainable heuristics, rather than solving many problems related to actual intelligence.
It seems pretty likely that we will start to see "General AI" discovering problematic things like the unsolvable nature of ethics questions, the ungroundedness of truth claims, the immense silliness of religions and ideologies, etc.
Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates.
If existential depression is a mental friction from the lack of certainty about what to do, then some measure of it is probably necessary...
The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.
>The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.
This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actually matters for non-meta-level mathematics. Basically any theorem about a structure we actually care about will be sub-Turing-complete, and with modern type theories, we can tear down inductive types and rebuild them with stronger axioms when we need to. As a result, some self-referencing theorems are true-but-unprovable, but we never actually need those theorems.
Uncertainty in physics is either just probabilistic (in the case of typical experiments), or, in the special case of Heisenberg uncertainty... no actually, that's just probabilistic imprecision too. That's what Heisenberg's inequalities actually say: "the product of the standard deviations of these measurements must always be at least this much."
Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously.
It seems irrelevant that, as of now, "any problem we care about" is sub-Turing-complete. We're still taking baby steps as a species and the relevant timelines in context of this thread are futuristic. Agreed?
The point is that to maximally insist that "we can't know anything", and/or, "we can know everything" are both equally unreasonable positions.
> Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously.
S/he can address your concerns -- that was not my intent, but hopefully you agree that unreasonable insistence on maximalist positions inherently carries the danger of "political" authoritarianism.
Your practical position reminds of a purported exchange between Wittgenstein and Turing, per Hewitt [ref]. I am sympathetic to it. But reminder again that my initial comments here were in context of intelligent machines. In fact as I am writing this little note, I am entertaining the thought that a veritable intelligent machine may in fact review the 3 (methodological) constraints noted, and shrug it off as practically unimportant. Or it may become alarmed. :)
I never meant to imply "we know nothing, we had better give up."
What I meant was that the dystopian imaginations of AI (Terminator, paper clip maximizers, etc) involve the machines acquiring a strong moral certainty that doesn't ever pause for doubt.
If I've been reading too much of somebody it's probably Richard Rorty.
There's a similar saying I like (don't know where it's from, if anywhere)
"Artificial intelligence is a group of problems that we don't know how to solve. As soon as we know how to solve one, it gets a name and is no longer AI."
To be fair most of human "intelligence" seems to be pattern recognition and extrapolating data from those patterns. My guess is that if you made a robot that is really, really good at recognizing and extrapolating from arbitrary patterns and then gave it some intrinsic goals then you are pretty much at "true" AI.
Intelligence is not mostly pattern recognition and classification? I can't imagine what you'd think it could be that wouldn't ultimately be called both of these things.
Intelligence is the ability for and speed of processing new information, at least as it's measured by metrics like IQ.
Sometimes AI/ML is directly modeled after human/animal thinking (decision trees, neural networks, reinforcement learning) and sometimes it's not (Bayes' theorem, regression, general stats). What constitutes intelligence still boils down to being able to correctly and quickly process new incoming information based on prior information. I believe it definitely qualifies.