WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

John McCarthy

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/

 A long story made short:

[1]The ability of a computer or other  such machines to perform actions thought to require intelligence is called artificial intelligence.

[2] These machines are  actually just following  our directions very fast

[3] Artificial intelligence cannot surpass the human intelligence  as   it is created by A SUPER INTELLIGENT HUMAN  to facilitate a certain set of actions as per his need, time and place..

What is artificial intelligence?

AI: A textbook definition

"The starting point is easy.  Simply put, artificial intelligence is a sub-field of computer science. Its goal is to enable the development of computers that are able to do things normally done by people -- in particular, things associated with people acting intelligently.

Stanford researcher John McCarthy coined the term in 1956 during what is now called The Dartmouth Conference, where the core mission of the AI field was defined.

If we start with this definition, any program can be considered AI if it does something that we would normally think of as intelligent in humans.  How the program does it is not the issue, just that is able to do it at all. That is, it is AI if it is smart, but it doesn’t have to be smart like us..."

There was a thread about!

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2906336/emerging-technology/what-is-artificial-intelligence.html

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_Artificial_Intelligence

AI is a technique through which a machine follows instruction as human brain.

One of the characteristics is that the AI programs may be modified from the inside more frequently then common programs. That is their advantages but also their risk, especially when the builder thus not state clear stopping points.

The same problem of course arises when too much powe is given to a single person without possibility of control (dictator). 

I agree with Marg about the risks of unsufficient control of unpredictable evolutions.

A classical computer science example is giving by stopping-time. Very often mathematicians have the bad habit of stating that a computation program must stop when the error is less than 1/1000. Unfortunately they do not consider that in some cases (usually the most interesting) this goal is never achieved so that the program goes on indefinitely. A stopping-time must be certain, perhaps from outside, stating for example that after 1 million interations it will be stopped  even if it does not reach its goal.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands for any man-made device or system capable of  performing actions like logical deduction  and inference creativity, the ability to make decisions based on past experience or insufficient or conflicting information, and the ability to understand  language, etc. which are thought to require intelligence. 

Definitions of artificial intelligence according to eight recent textbooks are shown in the table below. These definitions vary along two main dimensions. The definitions 1,2,5 and 6  are  concerned with thought processes and reasoning, whereas the others address behavior

The exciting new effort to make computers think ... machines with minds, in the full and literal sense'' (Haugeland, 1985)

`The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning '' (Bellman, 1978)

"The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models'' (Charniak and McDermott, 1985)`

`The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act'' (Winston, 1992)

"The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people'' (Kurzweil, 1990)`

"The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better'' (Rich and Knight, 1991)

A field of study that seeks to explain and emulate intelligent behavior in terms of computational processes'' (Schalkoff, 1990)`

`The branch of computer science that is concerned with the automation of intelligent behavior'' (Luger and Stubblefield, 1993)

Source: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/intro.html

A course thought by professor Stuart Russel in university of California, Berkeley

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/intro.html

Definition of AI by experts

Herbert Simon: We call programs intelligent if they exhibit behaviors that would be regarded intelligent if they were exhibited by human beings.

Elaine Rich: AI is the study of techniques for solving exponentially hard problems in polynomial time by exploiting knowledge about the problem domain.

Elaine Rich and Kevin Knight: AI is the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.

Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig: [AI] has to do with smart programs, so let's get on and write some.

Avron Barr and Edward Feigenbaum: Physicists ask what kind of place this universe is and seek to characterize its behavior systematically. Biologists ask what it means for a physical system to be living. We in AI wonder what kind of information-processing system can ask such questions.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eugene/quotes/ai.html

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Think Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the non-human oriented approach to integrate various technologies in order to emulate human-kind of intelligence like input / signal / voice recognition, storing, searching, understanding, thinking, reasoning, decision-making, output recommendation, learning etc.

What happens to the AI program when it undergoes evolution?

No doubt AI is becoming more intelligent as new / emerging technologies are used in developing AI like IoT, big data analytics, software defined various things etc.  The more intelligent, autonomous (thinking on its own) and less dependent on human influence, some of us might perceive AI as a threat / competition to human's intelligence or existence.

Dear @Anup, I find this article relevant for your research question!

Can We Grow Artificial Intelligence?

"...There is no doubt that traditional programming methods are better suited for engineering simple systems quickly, but they also require a complete understanding of how a system works. Conversely, evolutionary algorithms only require a picture of what the end result should look like. The heavy lifting is done by the trial-and-error nature of artificial selection; perfect for the problem of recreating intelligence, where we don’t understand all the rules at play. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could combine the best of both worlds—manually engineering the parts we understand, and letting evolution give us a helping hand with the parts we don’t, to quickly develop AI systems?..."

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/spark/2012/10/05/can-we-grow-artificial-intelligence

The meaning of Artificial intelligence can be understood by the book titled "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern approach" by Peter Norvig & Stuart J. Russell.

But according to me the definition to it is like making computers behave like human beings.

"It is a conglomeration of algorithms which are capable of making a computer to behave/act/perform like a biological creature for the given moment Humans are better"

All these beautiful brains which are being neglected, I don't understand why AI is so excited. It will be always a reduction as nobody speaks about the moral principles underlying the programs. which philosophy is taken. There is not existing even a general paradigm of neuroscience.

"There are a number of cognitive tasks that people do easily — often, indeed, with no conscious thought at all — but that are extremely hard to program on computers. Archetypal examples are vision and natural language understanding. Artificial intelligence, as I define it, is the study of getting computers to carry out these tasks." - Ernest Davis

Hi RG members,

Would like to share the following 2 YouTube clips about AI which is getting more real & important in our lives.  Hope you enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2mC-NUAmMk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ystdF6jN7hc

The possibilities of artificial intelligence are endless. Artificial intelligence is used to help pilots fly planes. Robotics with artificial intelligence interaction with laser, ultrasound, MRI scanning, are performing delicate brain surgery more accurately than by traditional surgical approaches. AI was used in the investigation of Mars. The artificially intelligent, Sojourner, was programmed to leave the Pathfinder to explore on its own. Robots are used in areas of dangerous chemicals or radioactivity. The present and prospective research are on building human-like robots with human intelligence. If A.I. machines can be capable of doing tasks originally done by humans, then the role of humans will change. Robots have already begun to replace factory workers. They are acting as surgeons, pilots, astronauts, etc.

Although A.I. would have several different interpretations, broadly it  attempts to mimic human intelligence,  although it has made incremental progress over time, one must be cognisant of it's limitations especially when attempting to mimic human intelligence, which I see as the ultimate intelligence on this physical earth.

After all who conceptualised, designed and constructed and programmed working models of computers, yes human beings, who possess consciousnesses, which I would suggest is  a necessary component in any entity which would act in a manner similar to human like intelligence. I would also suggest that 'common sense' would emanate from consciousnesses, and probably many more 'human like' attributes.

The big question is how do we attempt to understand what human consciousnesses is, probably we would need an collaborative team consisting of philosophers, psychologists and of course computer scientists ! If we have a common agreement from this team, how do we progress from there?

Dear @Anup, I find this article about Singularity and Artificial Intelligence very good one.

"The "singularity" concept is broader than the prediction of strong AI and can refer to severaldistinct sub-meanings. Like with most ideas, there's a lot of fantasy and exaggeration associated with "the singularity," but at least the core idea that technology will progress at an accelerating rate for some time to come, absent major setbacks, is not particularly controversial. Exponential growth is the standard model in economics, and while this can't continue forever, it has been a robust pattern throughout human and even pre-human history.

MIRI emphasizes AI for a good reason: At the end of the day, the long-term future of our galaxy will be dictated by AI, not by biotech, nanotech, or other lower-level systems. AI is the "brains of the operation." Of course, this doesn't automatically imply that AI should be the primary focus of our attention. Maybe other revolutionary technologies or social forces will come first and deserve higher priority. In practice, I think focusing on AI specifically seems quite important even relative to competing scenarios, but it's good to explore many areas in parallel to at least a shallow depth.

In addition, I don't see a sharp distinction between "AI" and other fields. Progress in AI software relies heavily on computer hardware, and it depends at least a little bit on other fundamentals of computer science, like programming languages, operating systems, distributed systems, and networks. AI also shares significant overlap with neuroscience; this is especially true if whole brain emulation arrives before bottom-up AI. And everything else in society matters a lot too: How intelligent and engineering-oriented are citizens? How much do governments fund AI and cognitive-science research? (I'd encourage less rather than more.) What kinds of military and commercial applications are being developed? Are other industrial backbone components of society stable? What memetic lenses does society have for understanding and grappling with these trends? And so on. The AI story is part of a larger story of social and technological change, in which one part influences other parts..."

https://foundational-research.org/thoughts-on-robots-ai-and-intelligence-explosion/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute

Artificially intelligent computing methods/systems for automated perception, learning, understanding, and reasoning have become commonplace in our lives; on the other hand, advance in the science and technology of AI warrants to promote its responsible use. It is, therefore, the technology industry need to pay greater attention to software quality and cyber-security as we increasingly rely on AI in safety-critical functions. And we must not put AI algorithms in control of potentially dangerous systems until a high degree of assurance that they will behave safely and properly, is in place.