Narrow AI

Narrow AI's Dark Secrets Articles about AI are published everyday. The term "AI" is used in a very narrow sense in the majority of these articles: it means applications based on training artificial neural networks under the control of sophisticated algorithms to solve very particular problems. Here is the first dark secret: This kind of AI isn't even AI. Whatever this software has, the one thing it lacks is anything that resembles intelligence. Intelligence is what distinguishes us from the other animals as demonstrated by its product: knowledge about the world. It is our knowledge and nothing else that has made us masters of the world around us. Not our clear vision, our acute hearing or our subtle motor control, other animals do that every bit as well or better. The developers of this technology understand that and so a term was invented some years ago to separate these kind of programs with real AI; Narrow AI which is in used in contrast to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which is the kind that processes and creates world knowledge. Here's the second dark secret. The machine learning we have been hearing about isn't learning at all in the usual sense.  When a human "learns" how to ride a bicycle, they do so by practicing until the neural pathways that coordinate the interaction of the senses and muscles have been sufficiently established to allow one to stay balanced. This “neural learning” is clearly very different than the kind of “cognitive [...]