Definitions of Artificial Intelligence
Oppositions, legal, textbook, national — there are many ways to attempt defining what artificial intelligence is
When I start talking to people about artificial intelligence I am often asked what it is. I have seen other become annoyed at those asking this question, however to me I believe it is a good one. Most texts that I read go on about artificial intelligence (AI) without attempting to define what the field of AI is. I have certainly committed this mistake myself many times. As such I hope this article can be helpful.
Starting a navigation through or within the field of artificial intelligence seems like a daunting journey to set out on. It does not either seem like a straightforward journey with one destination. However as mentioned in the introduction it is not uncommon to find two sides or extremes. This brings us first to an oppositional pair in representing AI. Namely the narrow or applied as opposed to the artificial general intelligence.
Narrow AI: is the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks. Perhaps it can be said that Applied AI in this sense is the most common usage and easier to define than its counterpart (Goertzel, 2007). This has elsewhere been called applied AI (Dutta, 2012).
Artificial general intelligence (AGI): ”Simply stated, the goal of AGI research as considered here is the development and demonstration of systems that exhibit the broad range of general intelligence found in humans.” (Adam, 2012)
Legal definition: artificial intelligence can be defined as. the capability of a device to perform functions that are normally associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning, learning and self-improvement (Willick, 1983).
Textbook definition: Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig did in one of the most widely distributed books about AI called “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”, define AI as “the designing and building of intelligent agents that receive percepts from the environment and take actions that affect that environment.” (Russel & Norvig, 2016).
A leading online course in Scandinavia where I am from is contributing to defining artificial intelligence. So far over 1% of Finland’s population and a total of 140,000 students have started the free on-line training course ”Elements of AI” — Sweden announced it wanted a percentage of their population to do so as well (AI Innovation of Sweden, 2019).
There are discussions in Norway as well for adoption, and it is not unlikely that Denmark will follow. It was in September 2019 announced that this free course would be used to train employees in the European Union, so it may have a wider impact (University of Helsinki, 2019). It is hard to say whether definition power will be a competitive advantage or hindrance in this regard.
On February 11th 2019 the United States made an Executive Order on AI. Despite mention of AI within most areas of American society AI was not defined clearly in any particular way (The White House, 2019). China’s three year action plan 2018–2020 on the development of artificial intelligence does not seem to address this either looking at the English translation (New America, 2018).
In the Oxford Dictionary (Lexico, 2019) AI is defined as: ”the theory and development of computer systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation and interpretation.”
When you see ’artificial intelligence’ it can carry with it different meanings. Make sure you try to open this suitcase term first to have better and more meaningful discussions where common ground can be more easily found.
References:
Adams, S., Arel, I., Bach, J., Coop, R., Furlan, R., Goertzel, B., … & Shapiro, S. C. (2012). Mapping the landscape of human-level artificial general intelligence. AI magazine, 33(1), 25–42.
AI Innovation of Sweden. (2019, February 21). Sweden challenged by Finland on AI. Retrieved from https://www.ai.se/en/news/sweden-challenged-finland-ai
Dutta, S. (2014). Knowledge processing and applied artificial intelligence. Elsevier.
Elements of AI. (2019). A free online introduction to artificial intelligence for non-experts. Retrieved from https://elementsofai.com/
Goertzel, B. (2007). Artificial general intelligence (Vol. 2). C. Pennachin (Ed.). New York: Springer.
Lexico. (2019). Artificial Intelligence: Definition of Artificial Intelligence by Lexico. Retrieved from https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/artificial_intelligence
New America. (2018, January). Translation: Chinese government outlines AI ambitions through 2020. Retrieved from https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/translation-chinese-government-outlines-ai-ambitions-through-2020/
Russell, S. J., & Norvig, P. (2016). Artificial intelligence: a modern approach. Malaysia; Pearson Education Limited,.
The White House. (2019, February). Artificial Intelligence for the American People. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/ai/
University of Helsinki. (2019, September 18). The Finnish ‘Elements of AI’ online course trains employees of the European Union. Retrieved from https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/data-science-news/the-finnish-elements-of-ai-online-course-trains-employees-of-the-european-union
Willick, M. S. (1983). Artificial intelligence: Some legal approaches and implications. AI Magazine, 4(2), 5–5.
This is day 110 of #500daysofAI. My current focus for day 101–200 is mostly on Python programming, however today I choose to edit the introduction to a book I am working on. If you enjoy this article please give me a response as I do want to improve my writing or discover new research, companies and projects.
