Monday, May 19, 2008

Strong AI

Strong AI is artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence—the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of artificial intelligence research and an important topic for anyone interested in the future, such as science fiction writers and futurists. Strong AI is also referred to as "artificial general intelligence" or as the ability to perform "general intelligent action". Strong AI is also closely related to such traits as sentience, sapience, self-awareness and consciousness.

Some references emphasize a distinction between strong AI and "applied AI": the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks that do not encompass the full range of human cognitive abilities. The term "strong AI" was adopted from the name of an argument in the philosophy of artificial intelligence first identified by John Searle as part of his Chinese room argument in 1980. He wanted to distinguish between two different hypotheses about artificial intelligence:
  • An artificial intelligence system can think and have a mind.
  • An artificial intelligence system can (only) act like it thinks and has a mind.
The first one is called "the strong AI hypothesis" and the second is "the weak AI hypothesis" because the first one makes the stronger statement: it assumes something special has happened to the machine that goes beyond all its abilities that we can test. Searle referred to the "strong AI hypothesis" as "strong AI". This usage, which is fundamentally different than the subject of this article, is common in academic AI research and textbooks.

The term "strong AI" is now used to describe any artificial intelligence system that acts like it has a mind, regardless of whether a philosopher would be able to determine if it actually has a mind or not. As Russell and Norvig write: "Most AI researchers take the weak AI hypothesis for granted, and don't care about the strong AI hypothesis." AI researchers are interested in a related statement: “An artificial intelligence system can think as well or better than people do”.

Related Links:
San Francisco recruiters

No comments: