Strong AI
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Strong AI is a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that can truly reason and solve problems; a strong AI is said to be sentient, or self-aware, but may or may not exhibit human-like thought processes.
The term strong AI was originally coined by John Searle and was applied to digital computers and other information processing machines. Searle defined strong AI:
- "according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind" (J. Searle in Minds, Brains and Programs. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, 1980).
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General Artificial Intelligence
The approach of general artificial intelligence research is to create a machine that can properly replicate the intelligence of humans in its entirety. As yet, there is very little research devoted to this, however, because the assumption is that intelligence and cognition is too complex to be properly replicated in a complete form. Some research is being done, however, usually by small groups of computer scientists.
The key feature that distinguishes Strong AI from Weak AI is that in Strong AI the computer becomes a conscious mind, not simply an intelligent, problem solving device. The distinction is a philosophical distinction and does not mean that devices that demonstrate Weak AI are necessarily weaker or less good at solving problems than devices that demonstrate Strong AI.
Hypothetical consequences of AI
Some observers foresee the development of systems that are far more intelligent and complex than anything currently known. One name for these hypothetical systems is artilects. With the introduction of artificially intelligent non-deterministic systems, many ethical issues will arise. Many of these issues have never been encountered by humanity.
Over time, debates have tended to focus less and less on "possibility" and more on "desirability", as emphasized in the "Cosmist" (versus "Terran") debates initiated by Hugo de Garis and Kevin Warwick. A Cosmist, according to de Garis, is actually seeking to build more intelligent successors to the human species. The emergence of this debate suggests that desirability questions may also have influenced some of the early thinkers "against".
Designing systems which exceed the intelligence of human beings raises fundamental ethical considerations. Some of these issues are outlined below.
- In order to be intelligent does AI need to replicate human thought, and if so, to what extent (eg. can expert systems become AI)? What other avenues to achieving AI exist?
- How do we assess the intelligence or sapience of AI?
- Can AI be defined in a graded sense (eg. with human-level intelligence graded as 1.0)? What does it mean to have a graduated scale? Is categorisation necessary or important?
- AI rights — if AI is comparable in intelligence to humans then they should have comparable rights (as corollary, if AI is more intelligent than humans, would we retain our 'rights'?)
- Can AIs be "smarter" than humans in the same way that we are "smarter" than other animals?
- Designing and implementing AI 'safeguards'. It is crucial to understand why safeguards should be considered in the first place, however to what extent is it possible to implement safeguards in relation to a superhuman AI? How effective could any such safeguards be?
- Some may question the impact upon careers and jobs (eg. there would at least be potential for the problems associated with free trade), however the more crucial issue is the wider impact upon humanity as a whole and human life.
- The Singularity
These points apply to both Strong AI and Weak AI. The crucial new point in Strong AI is whether it is ethical or sensible to produce conscious machines. Such machines would be slaves rather than tools.
Philosophy of strong AI and consciousness
John Searle and most others involved in this debate address whether a machine that works solely through the transformation of encoded data could be a mind, not the wider issue of monism versus dualism (i.e., whether a machine of any type, including biological machines, could contain a mind).
Searle states in his Chinese room argument that information processors carry encoded data which describe other things. The encoded data itself is meaningless without a cross reference to the things it describes. This leads Searle to point out that there is no meaning or understanding in an information processor itself. As a result Searle claims that even a machine that passed the Turing test would not necessarily be conscious in the human sense.
Some philosophers hold that if Weak AI is possible then Strong AI must also be possible. Daniel C. Dennett argues in Consciousness Explained that if there is no magic spark or soul, then Man is just a machine, and he asks why the Man-machine should have a privileged position over all other possible machines when it comes to intelligence or 'mind'. Simon Blackburn in his introduction to philosophy, Think, points out that you might appear intelligent but there is no way of telling if that intelligence is real (i.e., a 'mind'). However, if the discussion is limited to strong AI rather than artificial consciousness it may be possible to identify features of human minds that do not occur in information processing computers.
Many strong AI proponents believe the mind is subject to the Church-Turing thesis. This belief is problematic, because an information processor can be constructed out of balls and wood. Although such a device would be very slow and failure-prone, it could do anything that a modern computer can do. If the mind is Turing-compatible, it implies that a device made of rolling balls and wooden channels can contain a conscious mind.
Roger Penrose attacked the applicability of the Church-Turing thesis directly by drawing attention to the halting problem in which certain types of computation cannot be performed by information systems yet seem to be performed by human minds.
Ultimately the truth of Strong AI depends upon whether information processing machines can include all the properties of minds such as Consciousness. However, Weak AI is independent of the Strong AI problem and there can be no doubt that many of the features of modern computers such as multiplication or database searching might have been considered 'intelligent' only a century ago.
See also
- Artificial intelligence
- Artificial consciousness
- Dennett's multiple drafts model
- the Singularity - a time at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of current-day human beings to understand it, or the point
References
- John Searle: Minds, Brains and Programs Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-457 1980. (http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/84/bbs00000484-00/bbs.searle2.html)
- AGIRI (http://agiri.org/)