Artificial Intelligence Skepticism by Josh Pippin

? Will Artificial Intelligence ever exist?

Joseph Weizenbaum Creator of Eliza Computer Power and Human Reason “an organism is defined, in large part, by the problems it faces. Man faces problems no machine could possibly be made to face. Man is not a machine”

Weizenbaum’s Position 1. “the ability of even the most advanced of currently existing computer systems to acquire information … is still extremely limited” - Not enough knowledge about natural-language recognition/understanding 2. “it is not obvious that all human knowledge is encodable in ‘information structures’, however complex” - For instance touching someone’s hand - Giving someone a kiss (maybe it’s ok, or maybe you get slapped)

Position-Continued 3. “there are some things that people come to know only as a consequence of having been treated as human beings by other human beings” - How can you teach a computer to be “afraid”? 4. “even the kinds of knowledge that appear superficially to be communicable from one human being to another in language alone are in fact not altogether so communicable”

-intelligence manifests itself only relative to specific social and cultural contexts. -Human Intelligence and Computer Intelligence cannot be compared. More Weizenbaum thoughts…

John Searle Language Philosopher Sketched a thought experiment of artificial language cognition similar to the Turing Test. - Chinese Room Argument

Chinese Room Argument Strong A.I. - Successful construction of an artificially intelligent computer that acts as if it can understand Chinese. - Given Chinese characters as input, and a computer program that presents instructions for it to follow, it can produce output, also in Chinese characters. - It can sufficiently fool a human Chinese speaker into thinking that it is also a human Chinese speaker by answering all of the questions from the human with appropriate responses.

Chinese Room Argument (cont.) Weak A.I. (Counter-example) - Imagine that you are a monolingual English speaker locked in a room by yourself. - Messages are passed into the room with Chinese symbols on them. - The instruction books (English) in the room tell you what to write in response to the input. - You progressively get very good at following the English rules and no one outside of the room can tell that you are not a human Chinese speaker. - From their point of view, you are a human Chinese speaker, but from your own point of view you know you cannot speak Chinese. - His conclusion is that computers will only be able to simulate real thought.

Skeptic Propaganda