الذكاء الاصطناعي – دليل الأنظمة الذكية – الإصدار الثاني / Artificial Intelligence – A Guide to Intelligent Systems – Second Edition

Artificial Intelligence – A Guide to Intelligent Systems – Second Edition:

Philosophers have been trying for over two thousand years to understand and resolve two big questions of the universe: how does a human mind work, and can non-humans have minds? However, these questions are still unanswered.

Some philosophers have picked up the computational approach originated by computer scientists and accepted the idea that machines can do everything that humans can do. Others have openly opposed this idea, claiming that such highly sophisticated behavior as love, creative discovery, and moral choice will always be beyond the scope of any machine.

The nature of philosophy allows for disagreements to remain unresolved.

In fact, engineers and scientists have already built machines that we can call ‘intelligent’. So what does the word ‘intelligence’ mean? Let us look at a dictionary definition.

1 Someone’s intelligence is their ability to understand and learn things.

2 Intelligence is the ability to think and understand instead of doing things by instinct or automatically.

Thus, according to the first definition, intelligence is the quality possessed by humans. But the second definition suggests a completely different approach and gives some flexibility; it does not specify whether it is someone or something that has the ability to think and understand.

Now we should discover what thinking means. Let us consult our dictionary again.

Thinking is the activity of using your brain to consider a problem or to create an idea.

So, in order to think, someone or something has to have a brain, or in other words, an organ that enables someone or something to learn and understand things, solve problems and make decisions.

So we can define intelligence as ‘the ability to learn and understand, to solve problems and to make decisions.

The very question that asks whether computers can be intelligent, or whether machines can think, came to us from the ‘dark ages’ of artificial intelligence (from the late 1940s).

The goal of artificial intelligence (AI) as a science is to make machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans (Boden, 1977). Therefore, the answer to the question ‘Can machine think?’ was vitally important to the discipline. However, the answer is not a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, but rather a vague or fuzzy one.

Your everyday experience and common sense would have told you that. Some people are smarter in some ways than others. Sometimes we make very intelligent decisions but sometimes we also make very silly mistakes.

Some of us deal with complex mathematical and engineering problems but are moronic in philosophy and history. Some people are good at making money, while others are better at spending it.

As humans, we all have the ability to learn and understand, solve problems, and make decisions; however, our abilities are not equal and lie in different areas. Therefore, we should expect that if achines can think, some of them might be smarter than others in some ways.