Is AI a Myth?

nielsen eastof the sun 29
























15 comments on “Is AI a Myth?

  1. lfloridi says:

    Please read my reply to Searle, he basically did not read the book:

  2. James Cross says:

    But what is intelligence?

    Oddly in Bostrom’s book I can’t find a clear definition of it. We often prefix AI with “human level” as in human level AI. The reference point seems to be what humans do.

    I think we need a way of defining intelligence that is objective and abstract enough that it does not need to refer to humans or human capabilities.

    I tried to explore some of this partially in one of my posts where I discuss a paper by A. D. Wissner-Gross and C. E. Freer.

    I quote from them a definition of intelligent behavior.

    “Adaptive behavior might emerge more generally in open thermodynamic systems as a result of physical agents acting with some or all of the systems’ degrees of freedom so as to maximize the overall diversity of accessible future paths of their worlds.”

    My own post is here:

    Then there is the difficult relationship between intelligence and consciousness.

    We tend to believe these to be associated , that intelligence requires consciousness, although no such claims are being made for Watson or some of the “AI” technologies of today. Nevertheless, I think we somehow believe that once human level AI arrives the machines will be conscious. If they are not, they would not be human level.

    Or so the argument goes.

    What if the relationship is reversed? What if intelligence does require consciousness? What if consciousness is a creation of intelligence, one way in which intelligence expands its range of adaptive behavior?

    In that case, we could have superintelligence without consciousness.

    I hope to do something more expansive on this topic in the future but I have been on a little bit of hiatus from blogging.

    • Rick Searle says:

      Hello James,

      It’s strange, someone brought up the same issue over at the IEET, and since I’m responding to this on my lunch break I’ll give the same answer to you both.

      I don’t think consciousness is necessary for behavior to be intelligent meaning “an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments”

      We’re experiencing this with our machines, which aren’t conscious in any sense, but can often outperform us in some tasks that require intelligence e.g. chess. But we should have known that consciousness wasn’t necessary for intelligent behavior all along. Neither an immune system or a bee colony is conscious (rather than aware), but they certainly show intelligent behavior.

      I guess that leads to the question of what do I mean by consciousness? To me consciousness is the “what am I doing?” it’s a situational awareness we share with many animals (and perhaps are now beginning to share with some machines. Self-consciousness is a “higher” version of this it is the “what are you doing?” it is my own explanation of my situation and behavior as if I were “outside” of myself.

      I my view, we are only just beginning to crack the nut of machine consciousness and nowhere near obtaining self-consciousness which would require semantic understanding of language.

      I think we still could have super-intelligence without consciousness, but there would be gaps in such an intelligence’s understanding between its “internalized” world and the real world that would make it much less threatening than some think. The problem with super-intelligence that wasn’t conscious would be in it being hacked by human beings that knew very well what they were doing.

  3. James Cross says:

    I meant “What if intelligence does NOT require consciousness?”

  4. […] IEET By Rick Searle  Utopia or Dystopia Nov 30, […]

  5. James Cross says:


    That link is great!

    First, is the acknowledgement that they do not precisely know what intelligence is, then the working definition by Legg and Hutter definition of the “optimization power” concept of intelligence, because it measures an agent’s power to optimize the world according to its preferences.

    This is very close to what I am thinking also.

  6. Bill Benzon says:

    Hi Rick, if I may. I found my way from Tyler Cowen’s blog, where he mentions your review of Average is Over. I was struck by your remarks on the human need for intelligibility (to which I’ve responded over at New Savanna).

    On AI winter, the 1980s event was in fact the second time around for that sort of thing. The first time was in the 1960s. But the defunding tidn’t happen to AI, it happend to MT (machine translation), a sister discipline that morphed into computational linguistics and now, it seems, has become NLP (natural language processing). As you may know, machine translation is one of the founding problem areas of computer science (behind artillery tables and a-bombs). The US government poured lots of money into the effort in the 1950 and early 1960s. They were looking for a practical result, computers that could produce high quality translations from Russian into English. When that result seemed to recede ever further into the distance, they pulled the funding plug in the middle 1960s.

    Though my degree is in English Lit, my most important teacher was one of that first generation of researchers in computational linguistics, David Hays. He led the RAND Corporation’s MT project and, when he decided that the excitement was over at RAND, became founding chair of the Linguistics Department at SUNY Buffalo, which is where I worked with him (I was a graduate student in English). He was a great believer in computational research into human psychology and a skeptic about AI. Which is pretty much where I am.

    One thing I think has been going on is that lots of very intelligent and creative researchers have simply misunderestimated the difficulties of exploring and inhabiting a new intellectual continent. So, every time someone finds a new place that looks suitable for long-term living, they set up camp and declare that it’s all like this so we can start putting up the houses and send home for the women and children. Well, it isn’t. Sooner or later the bears or vultures or snarks show themselves and make it clear that this is still wild unexplored country.

    It’s vast, immesurably vast.

    My own view is that there is a “singularity” in the future, and it does involve computing in an assisting role. But the singularity happens to us when we start putting lots of things together and suddenly find ourselves with more sophisticated ways of looking at things, including the problem of intelligence. Here’s a longish post on that: Redefining the Coming Singularity – It’s not what you think.

    • Rick Searle says:

      Hi Bill, thanks for linking to my posts. I’ll try to put this comment both here and on your own blog to make sure you see it, for I would like to hear your response.

      Like yourself, I do not not believe in the Singularity as an “intelligence explosion”. Though, what I think Cowen discussed and which worries me as well is something different.

      We already have a problem of intelligibility when it comes to something like String Theory or even the fact that no one person can now know all the relevant fact of any field. One can imagine AI that isn’t intelligent in the broad human sense at all but is extremely good at mining for patterns in scientific data to come up with
      theories or techniques which we can essentially not understand- neither how they hang together or how they ultimately work. This is the possibility Cowen draws from computer chess where humans have written the programs but end up scratching their heads at what the program does even when it works.

      It’s an idea that was perhaps first developed by Stanislav Lem which I wrote about here:

  7. […] AI as currently constructed manifests intelligence more akin to puppet show illusions like the old Mechanical Turk than actual intellect. Nor does Gray really extend Kleist’s analogy to interrogate how we, both […]

  8. […] for platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who still provide the computation behind the magic-act that is much of contemporary […]

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