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Is AI Development Moving In the Wrong Direction? (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right? We often see reports that promise near breakthroughs, but time and again they don't come to fruition. The cause of this may be that we're trying to solve the wrong problem. Will Sweatman took a look at the history of AI projects starting with the code-breaking machines of WWII and moving up to modern efforts like IBM's Watson and Google's Inceptionism. His conclusion is that we haven't actually been trying to solve "intelligence" (or at least our concept of intelligence has been wrong). And that with faster computing and larger pools of data the goal has moved toward faster searches rather than true intelligence.
The problem with this argument is Wittgenstein's beetle. I can't even be sure that you are sentient, aware, and able to understand; all I can do is observe your actions and if those actions seem to be consistent with you having what we typically label as a "mind," then I pretty much accept that you have a mind.
We are currently very far away from having machines that can perform general actions consistent with having a mind, except in very artificial and controlled situations (e.g. a chess game, the Jeopardy! game show), but I would hardly say that it will never happen. And if it does, then how can you be sure it doesn't understand things, at least in the same way that I assume that you understand things? If the actions of the machine are the same as the actions of a person (who I believe does understand things), then why wouldn't I say there is a beetle in the box?