Gigaom AI Minute – June 29

Transcript

What does it mean to understand something? There have been recent stories in the news about artificial intelligences understanding contracts or legalees, or being able to read medical journals and understand them. The idea of what understanding is is best illustrated by a classic thought experiment by John Searle called the Chinese Room Argument. It goes something like this: there is a man who doesn't speak any Chinese, doesn't know anything about Chinese, and he's in this room with a bunch of special books. People slide questions to him under the door written in Chinese, and he can go through these books, looking up matching symbols, until he gets to a point where the book instructs him to copy symbols down--and, again, he doesn't know what they mean--and he slides the answer back out, and the answer is perfect. But the man doesn't know whether he wrote about cholera or coffee beans or what have you. So the question is: Does the man understand Chinese? And at its root, what you think about that question should inform how far you think we can advance with artificial intelligence.