AI and artifacts
16
May
Norvig and Russel’s book (2010) at the outset brings a table about thinking humanly and 
rationally, and acting humanly and rationally, the complete table for Artificial Intelligence is incomplete, even if considering the literature in the area on issues such as autonomy and consciousness.
Let us first analyze the four main quotations that are in the table of figure 1.1. of the book exemplified next, on Artificial Intelligence.
Thinking Humanly
“The exciting new effort to make computers think . . . machines with minds, in the
full and literal sense.” (Haugeland, 1985)
“ The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning . . .” (Bellman, 1978)
Thinking Rationally
“The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models.” (Charniak and McDermott, 1985)
“The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act.” (Winston, 1992)
Acting Humanly
“The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil, 1990)
“The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight, 1991)
Acting Rationally
“Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents.” (Poole et al., 1998)
“AI . . . is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts.” (Nilsson, 1998)
I understood from this framework that I am acting rationally, and that definitions and Poole and Nilsson are useful for my studies, but something is lacking, which is consciousness and autonomy, and in this sense the picture is incomplete.
But the question of consciousness is a fact, if we think a person may be aware, but an artifact, not Thomas Nagel’s argument, we can in the opposite sense think of AI “weak” and IA “strong” definitions given by John Searle, to differentiate whether machines are thinking rationally and humanly (strong AI) or just thinking and acting rationally (weak IA).
This led to another field that is today called general IA and deep IA.
NORVIG, P.; RUSSEL, P. (2010) Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach 3nd ed., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2010.
