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I think this is partly down to us humans defining "intelligence" as "like us". We have a very specific set of evolved traits that define our understanding of the universe. A lot of that is social. So our "understanding" of the phrase "call Carol" includes a wide range of social cues about what that means, and your example is perfect: "call Carol" means that I want to talk to her, and that would be better done in person if possible, but that "if possible" has a more-or-less specific range of "if she's within earshot so I can yell for her", which is limited to the range of a human voice (but not the maximum range, like screaming, but just a normal yelling range). Which is less if the door is closed, or there's music playing, or Kevin is trying to nap in the other room. And not at all if we're in a library, or concert, or even a public space where yelling would draw attention. If "call Carol" has to include all of these to qualify for "understanding" then I think I know some people who fail at this test. My go-to thought experiment on this is Dolphins. Dolphins are intelligent, have language, etc. But their understanding of the world must be so different. Trying to explain to a dolphin what "tripping someone up" means is going to be tricky. They may understand the words, but they'll never understand the concept. We swim in a sea of social cues and non-verbal communication. We can program an AI to imitate more and more of this, and be aware of more of it, but it's like teaching dolphins about long-distance running. It's never going to come naturally. And they're never going to evolve that understanding naturally (like we do as children) because it's not in their nature. We anthropomophise our machines a lot, and we assume that they'll grow (like children) to grok all of our social cues eventually, because our only experience of similar situations is, well, children. But they're just machines, designed for a single purpose. They're never going to grok this. They're never going to be "like us" and really understand all the social ramifications of "call Carol". At some point I think we're going to have to accept this, and say that the machine understands the phrase "call Carol" enough. TFA draws the line at the machine calling Carol, and that seems reasonable. |