No Such Thing As Artificial Intelligence | Two Minute Papers #60

dear fellow Scholars this is two minute papers with Caro whether a technique can be deemed as artificial intelligence or not is a question that I would like to see exiled from future debates and argumentations of course anyone may take part in any debate of their liking I would however like to point out the futility of such Endeavors let me explain why ever heard a parent and a son having an argument whether the son is an adult or not you are not an adult because adults don't behave like this and arguments like that the argument is not really about whether a person is an adult but it is about the very definition of an adult do we Define an adult as someone who has common sense and behaves responsibly or is it enough to be of 18 or 21 years old to be an adult if we decide which definition we go for the scaffolding for the entire argument crumbles because it is built upon a term for which the definition is not agreed upon I feel that we have it the same with artificial intelligence in many debates the definition of

artificial intelligence or at least one possible definition is the following artificial intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software it is a bit of a copout so we have to go and check the definition of intelligence there are multiple definitions but for the sake of argument we are going to let this one slip one possible definition for intelligence is the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations now this sentence is teeming with il defined terms such as learn understand things deal with new situations difficult situations so if we have a shaky Definition of artificial intelligence it is quite possibly pointless to argue whether surf driving cars can be deemed artificially intelligent or not imagine two physicists arguing whether a material is ferromagnetic but none of them has the slightest idea what magnetism means if we look at it like this it is very easy to see the futility of such arguments if we had as poorly crafted definitions in physics as we have for intelligence magnetism would be defined as stuff pulling on other stuff this is the first part of the argument the second part is that artificial intelligence is imagined to be a mystical thing that only exists in the future or it may exist in the present but it has to be shrouded in mystery let me give you an example the AAR algorithm used to be called Ai and was and still is widely taught in AI courses at many universities AAR is used in many pathf finding situations where we seek to go from A to B on a map in the presence of possible obstacles it is widely used in robotics and computer games nowadays calling a pathf finding algorithm AI is simply Preposterous it is a simple well understood technique that does something we are used to imagine someone waving their GPS device claiming that there's AI in there but back then when it was new hazy and poorly understood we put it in a drawer with the label AI on it as soon as people start to understand it they pull it out from this drawer and disgustedly claim well this is not AI it's just a graph algorithm graphs are not AI That's Just mathematics it is important to note that none of the techniques that we see today are mysterious in any sense the entirety of deep learning and everything else is a series of carefully prescribed mathematical operations I will try to briefly assess the two arguments about AI are not about the algorithms they seem to be discussing but about the very definition of AI which is il defined at best AI is imagined to be a mystical thing that only exists in the future or it may exist in the present but it has to be in some way shrouded in mystery the good news is that using this knowledge we can easily diffuse such feal arguments if

someone says that deep learning is not artificial intelligence because all it does is Matrix algebra we can ask okay what is your definition of artificial intelligence if this person defines AI as being a sentient learning being akin to humans then we have immediately arrived to a conclusion that deep learning is not AI let us not fool ourselves by thinking that we are arguing about things when we are simply arguing about definitions as soon as the definition is agreed upon the conclusion

emerges effortlessly thanks for watching and for your generous support and I'll see you next time