this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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To follow rote instructions is not intelligence.
If following a simple algorithm is intelligence, then the entire field of software engineering has been producing AI since its inception rendering the term even more meaningless than it already is.
Opponent players in games have been labeled AI for decades, so yeah, software engineers have been producing AI for a while. If a computer can play a game of chess against you, it has intelligence, a very narrowly scoped intelligence, which is artificial, but intelligence nonetheless.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/intelligence
Simple algorithms are not intelligence. Some modern "AI" we have comes close to fitting some of these definitions, but simple algorithms do not.
We can call things whatever we want, that's the gift (and the curse) of language. It's imprecise and only has the meanings we ascribe to it, but you're the one who started this thread by demanding that "to say it is not intelligence is incorrect" and I've still have yet to find a reasonable argument for that claim within this entire thread. Instead all you've done is just tried to redefine intelligence to cover nearly everything and then pretended that your (not authoritative) wavy ass definition is the only correct one.
I'm not redefining anything, I'm just pointing out that intelligence is not as narrow as most people assume, it's a broad term that encompasses various gradations. It doesn't need to be complex or human-like to qualify as intelligence.
A single if statement arguably isn't intelligence, sure, but how many if statements is? Because at some point you can write a complex enough sequence of if statements that will exhibit intelligence. As I was saying in my other comments, where do we draw this line in the sand? If we use the definition from the link, which is:
Then 99% of animal species would not qualify as intelligent.
You may rightfully argue that term AI is too broad and that we could narrow it down to mean specifically "human-like" AI, but the truth is, that at this point, in computer science AI already refers to a wide range of systems, from basic decision-making algorithms to complex models like GPTs or neural networks.
My whole point is less about redefining intelligence and more about recognizing its spectrum, both in nature and in machines. But I don't expect for everybody to agree, even the expert in the fields don't.
"I'm not redefining anything, I'm just insisting that my definition of the term is the only correct one."
You're running a motte-and-bailey here. First you say someone else is definitively "not correct" in their usage of the term, and then you go on to make a more easily defensible argument of "well who is to say what the meaning of the term truly is? It's a very gray area".
By some definitions, certainly...and that's the whole point.
I think taken as a whole the term "AI" has more meaning if you take both words in the phrase into account together rather than separately.
For instance, computer opponents in early video games naturally fit the moniker "AI" because even though it obviously does not possess intelligence in the general sense of the term, the developers are trying to artificially fool you into thinking it does.
Ultimately, it's probably futile to try to rescue the phrase from the downward spiral it is on into meaninglessness, but I do not believe the word "intelligence" necessarily needs to spiral down in concert.
Its almost as if the word "intelligence" has been vague and semi-meaningless since its inception...
Have we ever had a solid, technical definition of intelligence?
I'm pretty sure dictionaries have an entry for the word, and the basic sense of the term is not covered by writing up a couple of if statements or a loop.