[nicklecompte]

The fundamental argument of "Artificial Intelligence, Natural Stupidity" is that AI researchers constantly abuse terms like "reasoning," "deduction," "understanding," and so on, deluding others and themselves that their machine is almost as intelligent as a human when it's clearly dumber than a dog. My cats don't need "general patterns" to form deductions, they deduce many sophisticated things (on their terms) with n=1 data points.

In the 80s the computers were indisputably dumber than ants. That's probably not true these days. But the decades-long refusal of most AI researchers to accept humility about the limitations of their knowledge (now they describe multiple-choice science trivia as "graduate level reasoning") suggests to me that none of us will live to see an AI that's smarter than a mouse. There's just too much money and ideology, and too little falsifiability.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Drew McDermot's warning is well-heeded, but there are established and well-understood definitions of deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning that go back to at least Charles Sanders Pierce (philosopher and pioneer of predicate logic, contemporary of Gotlob Frege) that are widely accepted in AI research, and that even McDermot would have accepted. See sig for intro.

[nicklecompte]

This is completely irrelevant. McDermot's point was that scientifically-plausible definitions of reasoning were not actually being used in practice by AI researchers when they made claims about their systems. That is just as true today.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I've read McDermot's paper a few times (it's a favourite of mine) and I don't remember that angle. Can you please clarify why you say that's his point?

[fishe]

Ants behave in ways that a modern computer still can't imitate. I don't think that generalized intelligence is possible but if it is it would need a different starting point than our current computing hardware. Even insects are flexible in ways that computers aren't.

[naasking]

> My cats don't need "general patterns" to form deductions, they deduce many sophisticated things (on their terms) with n=1 data points.

No they don't. That's just generalization, so they've seen plenty of other data points that are similar enough.