| OK, wow, the old guard sure knows how to write sensibly. This is a great
article. But I have to disagree with this (because of course I do): >> For example, when I tell Siri “Call Carol” and it dials the correct number,
you will have a hard time convincing me that Siri did not understand my
request. That is a very common-sense and down-to-earth non-definition of intelligence:
how can an entity that is answering a question correctly not "understand" the
question? I am going
to quote Richard Feynman who encountered an example of this "how": After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had
memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they
heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know
that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction
of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking
at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been
translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?”
I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at
the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the
water”! https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education In this (in?) famous passage Feynman is arguing that students of physics that
he met in Brazil didn't know physics, even though they had memorised physics
textbooks. Feynman doesn't talk about "understanding". Rather he talks about "knowing" a
subject. But his is also a very straight-forward definition of knowing: you
can tell whether someone knows a subject if you ask them many questions from
different angles and find that they can only answer the questions asked from
one single angle. So if I follow up "Siri, call Carol" with "Siri, what is a call" and Siri
answers by calling Carol, I know that Siri doesn't know what a call is,
probably doesn't know what a Carol is, or what a call-Carol is, and so that
Siri doesn't have any understanding from a very common-sense point of view. Not sure if this goes beyond the Chinese room argument though. Perhaps I'm
just on a diffferent side of it than Thomas Dietterich. |