AGI

Understanding Intelligence Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” proposed the following question: “Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?” To answer it, he described his now famous test in which a human judge engages in a natural language conversation via a text interface with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. The Turing Test bounds the domain of intelligence without defining what it is. We recognize intelligence by its results. John McCarthy, who coined the term Artificial Intelligence in 1955, defined it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." A very straight-forward definition, yet few terms have been more obfuscated by hype and extravagant claims, imbued with both hope and dread, or denounced as fantasy. Over the succeeding decades, the term has been loosely applied and is now often used to refer to software that does not by anyone’s definition enable machines to “do what we (as thinking entities) can do.” The process by which this has come about is no mystery. A researcher formulates a theory about what intelligence or one of its key components is and attempts to implement it in software. “Humans are intelligent because we can employ logic” and so rule-based inference engines are developed. “We are intelligent because our brains are composed of neural networks” and so software neural networks are [...]