Artificial Intelligence [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/art-inte.htm

Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) would be the possession of intelligence, or the
exercise of thought, by machines such as computers. Philosophically, the
main AI question is "Can there be such?" or, as Alan Turing put it, "Can
a machine think?" What makes this a philosophical and not just a
scientific and technical question is the scientific recalcitrance of the
concept of intelligence or thought and its moral, religious, and legal
significance. In European and other traditions, moral and legal standing
depend not just on what is outwardly done but also on inward states of
mind. Only rational individuals have standing as moral agents and status
as moral patients subject to certain harms, such as being betrayed. Only
sentient individuals are subject to certain other harms, such as pain and
suffering. Since computers give every outward appearance of performing
intellectual tasks, the question arises: "Are they really thinking?" And if
they are really thinking, are they not, then, owed similar rights to
rational human beings? Many fictional explorations of AI in literature and
film explore these very questions.

A complication arises if humans are animals and if animals are
themselves machines, as scientific biology supposes. Still, "we wish to
exclude from the machines” in question “men born in the usual manner"
(Alan Turing), or even in unusual manners such as in vitro fertilization or
ectogenesis. And if nonhuman animals think, we wish to exclude them
from the machines, too. More particularly, the AI thesis should be
understood to hold that thought, or intelligence, can be produced by
artificial means; made, not grown. For brevity’s sake, we will take
“machine” to denote just the artificial ones. Since the present interest in
thinking machines has been aroused by a particular kind of machine, an
electronic computer or digital computer, present controversies regarding
claims of artificial intelligence center on these.

Accordingly, the scientific discipline and engineering enterprise of AI has
been characterized as “the attempt to discover and implement the
computational means” to make machines “behave in ways that would be
called intelligent if a human were so behaving” (John McCarthy), or to
make them do things that “would require intelligence if done by men"
(Marvin Minsky). These standard formulations duck the question of
whether deeds which indicate intelligence when done by humans truly
indicate it when done by machines: that’s the philosophical question.
So-called weak AI grants the fact (or prospect) of intelligent-acting
machines; strong AI says these actions can be real intelligence. Strong

PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com

1 of 26 8/14/2007 11:53 PM


Artificial Intelligence [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/art-inte.htm

AI says some artificial computation is thought. Computationalism says
that all thought is computation. Though many strong AI advocates are
computationalists, these are logically independent claims: some artificial
computation being thought is consistent with some thought not being
computation, contra computationalism. All thought being computation is
consistent with some computation (and perhaps all artificial
computation) not being thought.


Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you
to those parts of this article)

1. Thinkers, and Thoughts
a. What Things Think?
b. Thought: Intelligence, Sentience, and Values
2. The Turing Test
3. Appearances of AI
a. Computers
i. Prehistory
ii. Theoretical Interlude: Turing Machines
iii. From Theory to Practice
b. "Existence Proofs" of AI
i. Low-Level Appearances and Attributions
ii. Theorem Proving and Mathematical Discovery
iii. Game Playing
iv. Planning
v. Robots
vi. Knowledge Representation (KR)
vii. Machine Learning (ML)
viii. Neural Networks and Connectionism
ix. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
c. On the Behavioral Evidence
4. Against AI: Objections and Replies
a. Computationalism and Competing Theories of Mind
b. Arguments from Behavioral Disabilities
i. The Mathematical Objection
ii. The Rule-bound Inflexibility or "Brittleness" of Machine
Behavior
iii. The Lack of Feelings Objection
iv. Scalability and Disunity Worries