AlphaGo Is Not AI

Its more like AlphaGo is a PIECE of strong AI. Deep learning, as its implemented today, is probably not the secret sauce of consciousness, but it is a powerful and useful subsystem. In that sense, it is a tangible step towards the eventual goal of general strong AI.

I used to think that the rarity of human mastery of games, and games' abstraction from the physical world, were what prevented most humans from perceiving machine intelligence as intelligence. Then the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge for self-driving vehicles showed that machines could perform a task that most adult Americans can perform, that no non-human animals have ever been taught to perform, and that requires significant awareness of the physical world. But AFAICT it didn't cause a sea change in how most people think about intelligence, human and otherwise.

There has been an uptick in people pondering the economic implications of driverless vehicles and a more robotic future. That discussion seems kind of oddly isolated from re-considering the nature of intelligence, human and otherwise. It's as if after the Industrial Revolution people kept narrowly scoping the meaning of "power" to "muscle power" rather than acknowledging mechanical forms. Oh, yes, that coal fired pump can remove water from the mine faster than I can... but it just uses clever tricks for faking power.

This is how I see it:

If the machine comes up with the decision making logic, it's AI, if it does not, it's not AI.

A sorting algorithm, in most cases, is a description of the logic to decide how to proceed at each step to accomplish the task of sorting. The computer merely executes that logic for us very very quickly.

On the other hand, self driving machine learning algorithms come up with the logic of how to base the decision of when to steer left/right, to what degree, when to accelerate and decelerate, to what degree, all by themselves. Often time, we can't even formalize the logic they use, we can only test to see how well it performs. This is AI. The computer originated intelligence, it did not simply execute it.

Within that, there is a spectrum which even human exhibit. I cannot come up with logic to solve all tasks. For most tasks, I would need a good teacher and a lot of practice before I can find on my own logic that can solve a task, even so slightly, depending on the difficulty of the task at hand.

I'd say there's only one exception to this rule. Sometimes it is useful to call something which appears intelligent AI. Like in most video games, the computer is actually simply executing the logic a programmer told it about, but to most players, you will believe as if it is coming up with it on its own. Most often, it does not and did not, a programmer came up with it, but you're fooled into thinking otherwise, and the computer appears sentient. This is not true intelligence, but being able to use logic to make decision, even if that logic did not originate from you, is probably a part of intelligence. In a sense, if I could program a machine to perform all tasks, even though it uses the logic that I came up with, that machine would appear quite useful. It would only fail when encountering a task it has never seen, or a condition in a task that's not accounted for in my logic. Machine learning would not fail at those, in that, it could re-learn from the new condition, and come up with a different way to solve the task.

Yes – stuff like this is confusing 'intelligence' with 'sentience'.

Playing go or chess would have been classified as activities clearly requiring intelligence in the recent past. We're just moving the goalpost whenever AI advances. At some point, it'll probably divide mankind into fractions which either want or don't want to grant certain rights to AI (possibly obsoleted by the great AI uprising of 2025-20-11 6:45:23am to 2025-20-11 6:45:25am)

Whilst I don't like the author's way of phrasing interaction with real world information as "fundamentally tied to robotics", humans whose range of movement is restricted to scrunching up one cheek have won Nobel prizes because even with their physiological limitations they've still had access to and assimilated information vastly more complex and unstructured than board positions for the game of Go in order to be able to devise their own considerably more complex and varied end goals and means of communication to reach them. Whilst a computer which can choose hundred of legal Go positions at each turn might actually have more output channels than Stephen Hawking, it hasn't had and doesn't have the range of inputs to be in a position to contemplate alternative end goals such as dictating books on theoretical physics or ordering a cheeseburger (let alone the ability to learn how to be understood by sympathetic non-computers enough to overcome its physical limitations)

One can turn it around: if an organism has no means of assessing or communicating with the outside world bar the ability to send and receive electrical signals so simple they can be mapped to the game of Go and whose survival to the next generation depends on electrical signals combining in various rare patterns hardcoded into its DNA (which could be mapped to the win conditions for the game of Go), would we even consider the possibility of such an organism being intelligent simply because its route to achieving those patterns was incomprehensible to and could not be deactivated by counter-stimuli from the humans that studied it? Would such a theoretical organism even need to be composed of more than one cell?