Gigaom AI Minute – October 23

Transcript

More than once I have turned to the question of, "What exactly is artificial about artificial intelligence?" Is it artificial in that it isn't really intelligence it just looks like it or seems like it? Or is it actually true literal intelligence?

One way to frame the problem is to think about AI as either being a simulation or instantiation. An instantiation is an actual instance of something. It is an occurrence of something. A computer program that plays chess is an instantiation of a chess player. It really is playing chess, but a computer program that models hurricanes is only a simulation. There's no real hurricane happening, there's no rain going on in the computer and it's just simulating the hurricane. If artificial intelligence is an instantiation of intelligence then there really is no limit to what we can do with it. If, however, it is simply simulated intelligence then the limits are actually probably reasonably low.