Philosophy of

Artificial
Intelligence
CS158-2: Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence
4th Term AY 2019-2020
 What is the Philosophy of AI?

What is “strong” versus “weak” AI?

Can a computer “think”?

Outline
Can a computer have a “free will”?

Can a computer be conscious?

Can a computer “feel”?

What is the Philosophy of AI
• The philosophy of AI asks the
question of whether computers,
machines in general, or for that
matter anything that is not of
natural origin can be said to have
a mind, and/ or to think.
What is “strong” versus
“weak” AI?
Strong vs Weak AI
• Strong AI
• machines do or ultimately will have minds
• has a complex algorithm that helps it act in different situations
• poker AI which can teach itself to adapt to and outsmart the skills of human opponents
• Weak AI
• they merely simulate, rather than duplicate, real intelligence
• pre-programmed by a human
• iPhone’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa (voice-activated assistance usually has a programmed
response)
• sense or ‘scan’ for things that are similar to what they already know, and classify them
accordingly
• The distinction is between whether machines can be truly intelligent or simply
able to act “as if” they are intelligent.
Can a computer think?
Computer manipulating capabilities = thinking?
• 1950 essay entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by
English mathematician Alan Turing
• Imitation Game
• An interrogator in a separate room, communicating with a man and a woman
only through written communication (preferably typed), attempting to guess
which is the man and which is the woman.
• The machine replaced the woman and is tasked with fooling the interrogator
into thinking it is the man, while the man is telling the truth about who he is.
Computers can’t think
• John Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California at
Berkeley
• computers can’t “think” since they don’t actually mean or do anything
— at best, they manipulate symbols
• Humans the ones associating their computations with the external world
Can a computer have free
will?
• Humans, and possibly some animals, have free will, but can a machine
or a computer also have free will?
• Computers may not have free will because they are different from us in
two key respect:
• they work according to well- understood engineering principles and so can
always be predicted;
• they can’t consider choices in the same sense that people do
Can a computer be
conscious?
Can computers be conscious?
• Some researchers tie consciousness to the role of emotional states and
physical embodiment
• Certainly seen no evidence of it to date
Can a computer feel?
Can a computer “feel”?
• It’s relatively simple to build a robot that flinches, cries out, and/ or
simply says, “Ouch, that hurts” when you pinch it. But does that say
anything about whether it feels pain?
• Since computers are so different from us (at least today) and are
designed by us for specific purposes (as opposed to naturally
occurring), it seems logical to say they don’t, and most likely never
will, have real feelings.
Questions?