Making Sense of AI. Anthony Elliott. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Anthony Elliott
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Математика
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509548910
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production of meanings, signs and values in socio-technical life, such as the ability to reason, generalize, or learn from past experience;

      5 the study and design of ‘intelligent agents’: any machine that perceives its environment, takes action that maximizes its goal, and optimizes learning and pattern recognition;

      6 the capability of machines and automated systems to imitate intelligent human behaviour;

      7 the mimicking of biological intelligence to facilitate the software application or intelligent machine to act with varying degrees of autonomy.

      Second, we may note that some of these formulations of AI seem to raise more questions than they can reasonably hope to answer. On several of these definitions, there is a direct equation between machine intelligence and human intelligence, but it is not clear whether this addresses only instrumental forms of (mathematical) reasoning or emotional intelligence. What of affect, passion and desire? Is intelligence the same as consciousness? Can non-human objects have intelligence? What happens to the body in equating machine and human intelligence? The human body is arguably the most palpable way in which we experience the world; it is the flesh and blood of human intelligence. The same is not true of machines with faces, and it is fair to say that all of the formulations on this list displace the complexity of the human body. These definitions are, in short, remorselessly abstract, indifferent to different forms of intelligence as well as detached from the whole human business of emotion, affect and interpersonal bonds.

      An objection to the glossy image presented by various tech companies that AI has only recently arrived, and arrived fully formed, is that machine intelligence and mechanical automatons are, in fact, historical through and through. Those advocating the technological hype of our times may not wish to be embroiled in trawling through the histories and counter-histories of various technologies, but expanding the historical boundaries of the discourse of AI by bringing back into consideration those developments banished to the background and left out of the official narrative is essential to combating the idea that AI is a straightforward, linear story which runs roughly from the 1956 Dartmouth Conference to the present day. The developments that unite an otherwise disparate and apparently unconnected series of topics in the emergence of AI require us to go back to the eighth century bc, where automatons and robots crop up in Greek myths such as that of Talos of Crete.4 Or you have to go back to the ancient world of Mesopotamia, where Muslim polymath Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari invented automatic gates and automated doors driven by hydropower, whilst simultaneously penning his programmatic text, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.5 An alternative historical starting point might be the ancient philosophy of Aristotle, who wrote of artificial slaves in his foundational Politics.6