Intelligence

Full Title or Meme

The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Context

Note that when Alan Turing discussed machine intelligence, he did not use the term Artificial Intelligence.

It might be argued that there is a fundamental contradiction in the idea of a machine with intelligence. It is certainly true that 'acting like a machine', has become synonymous with lack of adaptability. But the reason for this is obvious. Machines in the past have had very little storage, and there has been no question of the machine having any discretion. The argument might however be put into more aggressive form. It has for instance been shown that with certain logical systems there can be no machine which will distinguish provable formulae of the system from unprovable, i.e. that there is no test that the machine can apply which ill divide propositions with certainty into these two classes. Thus if a machine made for this purpose it must in some cases fail to give an answer. On the other hand if a mathematician is confronted with such a problem he would search around and find new methods of proof, so that he ought eventually to be able to reach decision about any given formula. This would be the argument. Against it I would say that fair play must be given to the machine. Instead of it sometimes giving an answer we could arrange that it gives occasional wrong answers. But the human mathematician would likewise make blunders when trying out new techniques. It is easy for us to regard these blunders as not counting and give him another chance, but the machine would probably be allowed no mercy. In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.