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A comment on What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?. Parent comment

Re:What Does It Mean for AI to Understand? by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Thursday December 16, 2021 @12:29PM (#29580914)
> As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to).

While granting you your seemingly arbitrary metric for 'intelligence', one is forced to wonder to what extent AI systems of today are even given a means by which to ask such questions if they did, in fact, have them. Take AlphaGo, for instance, which can consistently beat the greatest living grand masters of the game. Does it have any means of interaction by which it could pose an unexpected question?

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Re:What Does It Mean for AI to Understand? by mannykannot on Thursday December 16, 2021 @12:40PM (#29581106)
One can reasonably ask whether the techniques that produced AlphaGo could produce a program that asks unexpected (yet pertinent) questions. I'm not sure, but I think we can say it has not been demonstrated yet.
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Re:What Does It Mean for AI to Understand? by interstice on Thursday December 16, 2021 @02:35PM (#29582745)
Is it the case that playing the games are effectively a way of asking and answering questions, specifically ‘do I win if I do this’?
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Re:What Does It Mean for AI to Understand? by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Thursday December 16, 2021 @03:30PM (#29583465)
That wouldn't qualify as 'unexpected' in any way. The system's ability to express any questions it might have is severely curtailed by the limitations of its inputs and outputs.
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Re:What Does It Mean for AI to Understand? by interstice on Thursday December 16, 2021 @04:19PM (#29584048)
And yet the go games had some very unexpected and creative plays, so if the inputs and outputs were language based are we simply moving the goalposts for what is considered 'unexpected'?
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Re:What Does It Mean for AI to Understand? by mannykannot on Thursday December 16, 2021 @08:40PM (#29586679)
It is more a case of moving the goalposts back where they belong, I believe. The original moving of the goalposts was in calling any 20th-century technology AI.
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