The use of the word "intelligence" overall is problematic. To most people, "intelligence" is human inductive reasoning. We see "intelligent" creatures in mass media and books--creatures that act just like humans except aren't biological. We think of Commander Data from Star Trek. Proponents of AI know most people interpret the term that way and gladly use the term as a way of implying the same magic we see in media.
Intelligence is a human-biased term. We basically use it, informally at least, to separate ourselves from the rest of nature "oh, they're not sentient, they're not intelligent".
intelligence is what allows one to understand phrases and then construct meaning from it. e.g. the paper is yellow.
That's one, out of many, definitions of "intelligence". But there's no particular reason to insist that that is the definition of intelligence in any universal, objective sense. Especially in terms of talking about "artificial intelligence" where plenty of people involved in the field will allow that the goal is not necessarily to exactly replicate human intelligence, but rather simply to achieve behavior that matches "intelligent behavior" regardless of the mechanism behind it.
I think it’s reasonable to use the word intelligence, if you define intelligence as something like “a system’s ability to take in information and use that information rationally to decide what action to take to meet a goal”, which seems like a good definition to me. It might be tempting to define it in a way that only includes what humans do but I don’t think that’s a good general definition
The entire question is predicated on how you define "intelligence". Personally I subscribe to the view that we should avoid using the word altogether when referring to computers.
Sorry to disappoint, but those questions are bottomless pits of debating semantics.
We don't call it "intelligent" or "intelligence", we call it "artificial intelligence". Adjectives matter.
Furthermore, what is intelligence? Define it. Is an ant intelligent? Is a microbe which exhibits simple yet effective behavior intelligent? Is a machine that can play chess far better than any other known lifeform intelligent?
This is a serious issue. The notion of "intelligence" is so abstract and intangible, that giving it a concrete definition is nearly redefining it. Likely what we're calling intelligence, is an oversimplification of reality; somewhat akin to the species problem in biology.
Could you expand on why you don't believe "intelligence" is an appropriate word?
I guess I don't understand why a system built on "statistical modelling" would be incompatible with a system that has properties of "intelligence".
We use "intelligence" fairly loosely already. Significantly less intellectually capable animals are often referred to as "intelligent" – pigs, dogs, etc. Plus, the field of research applied "statistical modelling" belongs to literally is artificial "intelligence". I think it's fine (perhaps even appropriate) to refer to artificial systems which perform intellectual tasks as forms of intelligence.
> For example, in Real Time Analytics, there is something called a 'sketch', which though clever statistical techniques allows approximations of such things like top 10, average etc
This is a very narrow and weak example of artificial intelligence in my opinion.
I don't think the issue here is the word "intelligence", it's more that people tend to use human intelligence as the benchmark for what it means to be "intelligent". So when someone says something like "ChatGPT is intelligent" there is a subset of people who get annoyed because they think that person is directly equating ChatGPT's abilities with human-level intelligence.
AI has some good definitions as far as intelligence is concerned. Perhaps you are worried about consciousness or something, but this is not needed for a definition of what intelligence means.
The word 'intelligence' not being used would last about 5 minutes until somebody else had the idea to call these systems intelligent. Therefore word itself cannot be the root of it. The perception of these systems being intelligent is trivially derived from the nature and capabilities of the systems, it isn't some unfortunate fluke of language that foisted these comparisons on us.
Intelligence is the ability for and speed of processing new information, at least as it's measured by metrics like IQ.
Sometimes AI/ML is directly modeled after human/animal thinking (decision trees, neural networks, reinforcement learning) and sometimes it's not (Bayes' theorem, regression, general stats). What constitutes intelligence still boils down to being able to correctly and quickly process new incoming information based on prior information. I believe it definitely qualifies.
I agree with Moravec. As he points out a bit later on:
> Only on the outside, where they can be appreciated as a whole, will the impression of intelligence emerge. A human brain, too, does not exhibit the intelligence under a neurobiologist's microscope that it does participating in a lively conversation.
We only have fuzzy definitions of "intelligence", not any essential, unambiguous things we can point to at a minute level, like a specific arrangement of certain atoms.
Put another way, we've used the term "intelligent" to refer to people (or not) because we found it useful to describe a complex bundle of traits in a simple way. But now that we're training LLMs to do things that used to be assumed to be exclusively the capacity of humans, the term is getting stretched and twisted and losing some of its usefulness.
Maybe it would be more useful to subdivide the term a bit by referring to "human intelligence" versus "LLM intelligence". And when some new developments in AI seem like they're different from "LLM intelligence", we can call them by whatever distinguishes them, like "Q* intelligence", for example.
I think we humans commonly use the word “intelligence” as a placeholder for human-like ability to learn new skills, absorb new knowledge, process said information to filter/transform it, and the ability to apply it. It might help to distinguish effectiveness or usefulness from these capabilities - trees are effective in reproducing and useful perhaps, as are insects. But we wouldn’t consider them to be intelligent per my prior definition, unless you consider their species’ changes in response to selective pressure to be semantically similar to human intelligence. However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional, and so I don’t count them as intelligence. Ultimately it’s just about our definition and semantics.
I have been working in human and artificial intelligence for several years now. It is not at all apparent to me that intelligence has a clear meaning.
I think the definitional problem is significant, but the problem is even more fundamental than that. A couple of years ago, I witnessed a heated disagreement at a conference about whether intelligence required learning or not.
Does intelligence require embodiment? Perception? Sensation? Agency? Intentionality? Cognition? Metacognition? Other higher cognitive/executive functions?
These concepts are not just to embellish the definition a bit. They are fundamental to what intelligence is.
A plausible definition you could find in a journal article might be: An embodied agent that can intentionally solve problems using information obtained from the external environment plus introspection, by way of various executive functions, and then affect the external environment accordingly.
Some philosophers and researchers would agree, and some would disagree, because of what they each think intelligence is.
> but I think artificial intelligence is a very useful terminology and concept, not a marketing term.
I agree that the term is fine. But it is absolutely also used as a nonsense marketing term. ChatGPT or one of the other OpenAI models was calling itself an "advanced AI system" or some such bullshit. The term itself is not to blame, but people definitely (mis)use it that way.
This is a very problematic word. For example if you were a civil engineer and went "throw me any old design for a bridge, I have a river I need to cross", you'd have your license removed.
Intelligence is too massively loaded, and too much of a gradient even across humans to try to some up human or AI abilities. It is a multitude of different capabilities that don't necessarily have to be bundled together for something to be 'smart', 'useful', 'capable', and/or 'dangerous'.
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