Alexia Dunnon

Kidd

IB Theory of Knowledge

15th April 2021

“In What Sense, If Any, can a Machine Be Said to Know Something?”

Before we get into technology and artificial intelligence and other things of the sort, it is relevant

to define the term: “know,” i.e., knowledge. The definition of knowledge that will be used

throughout this essay is: “the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained

through experience or association. Thus, through the senses we begin to gain knowledge. With

this knowledge you should be able to practically and/or theoretically put it into practice.”

(Definition from Aristotle and Plato). Subsequently, it is important to illuminate the implications

of said definition. It implies that to truly “know” something you must first be able to recognize it

using your senses. While it is true that the more advanced versions of AI have been built to

resemble humans, it is safe to argue that the people who created the machine could have given

false information, or something could go wrong within the composition of the AI. Stated in

“Teaching machines to reason about what they see”, “A child who has never seen a pink

elephant can still describe one — unlike a computer. ‘The computer learns from data,’ says

Jiajun Wu, a PhD student at MIT. “The ability to generalize and recognize something you’ve

never seen before — a pink elephant — is very hard for machines.” Inferring that while

machines may “know” that pink and gray are two distinct colors because they have programming

that mimic our eyes, they do not hold the sufficient knowledge to apply what they have been
taught. They cannot interpret that information beyond the components they were built with (even

with sense preceptors); which, considering our definition, is a necessary factor.

In addition, another difference between their (AI) knowledge and ours is, with humans there is

some form of feelings that develop with said knowledge, an experience that is subjective to that

one person; while machines can learn to categorize, write, speak our language, etc. but they will

not experience the process of learning. It is just an input of information. Machines cannot form

experiences and memories from stimuli. “... statistical learning has its limits. It requires tons of

data, has trouble explaining its decisions, and is terrible at applying past knowledge to new

situations; It cannot comprehend an elephant that’s pink instead of gray” (Martineau). Machines

contain facts and components that allow them to find relations to said facts and hypothesize

correct results, but the machine cannot fully “know” or understand what the information they

have or come up with means, it is not able to take any own decisions or adjust faults on its own

(Weinberg); and a problem that arises with this is anything that is not based solely on facts

would baffle the technology (Gendler). Our definition of knowledge entails that we be able to

theoretically describe or explain what we know, sometimes theories have no plausible evidence

but is still considered to be knowledgeable in some sorts, in this case, AI’s fail once again.

In this day and age, technology is not yet advanced enough to truly know something in the way

the definition requires. Until then, Artificial Intelligence can still be useful without complete

knowledge regarding human development.

 Bibliography

1. https://news.mit.edu/2019/teaching-machines-to-reason-about-what-they-see-0402

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9vBczqMk0

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmoXByLkK14

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wLqsRLvV-c