Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI by William Herkewitz.
Hofstadter’s first response in the interview:
Well, artificial intelligence is a slippery term. It could refer to just getting machines to do things that seem intelligent on the surface, such as playing chess well or translating from one language to another on a superficial level—things that are impressive if you don’t look at the details. In that sense, we’ve already created what some people call artificial intelligence. But if you mean a machine that has real intelligence, that is thinking—that’s inaccurate. Watson is basically a text search algorithm connected to a database just like Google search. It doesn’t understand what it’s reading. In fact, read is the wrong word. It’s not reading anything because it’s not comprehending anything. Watson is finding text without having a clue as to what the text means. In that sense, there’s no intelligence there. It’s clever, it’s impressive, but it’s absolutely vacuous. (emphasis added)
You may remember Douglas Hofstadter as the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach
If Hofstadter’s point is that no mechanical device is “intelligent,” from a cuneiform tablet to a codex or even a digital computer such as Watson, I am in full agreement. A mechanical device can do nor more or less than it has been engineered to do.
What is curious about Watson is that what usefulness it displays, at least at playing Jeopardy, comes from analysis of prior responses of human players.
But most “AI” efforts don’t ask for a stream of human judgments but rather try to capture with algorithms the important points to remember.
Curious isnt it? The failure to ask a large audience of known intelligence users for their opinions, to be captured in an electronic form for further use.
And why stop with a large audience? Why not ask every researcher who submits a publication a series of questions about their paper and related work?
Reasoning (sorry) that the more intelligence you put into a mechanical storage device the more intelligence you maybe able to extract.
Present practices almost sound like discrimination against intelligent users in favor of using mechanical approaches.
I guess that depends on whether using mechanical devices or getting a useful result is the goal.
I first saw this in Stephen Arnold’s Getting a Failing Grade in Artificial Intelligence: Watson and Siri.