AlphaGo Is Not AI
The headline for this piece is clickbait. AlphaGo <i>is</i> AI, it&#x27;s just not strong AI. No AI is strong AI for the moment, but that doesn&#x27;t mean that the AI we have is uninteresting or a dead end, as the author seems to think.<p>The author and his editors deliberately conflate the two terms in the headline, and clarify after about a paragraph. Sure, AlphaGo is not strong AI. And Abraham Lincoln is dead. And there are lots of other things everyone knows that don&#x27;t deserve to be in the news.<p>Jean-Christophe Baillie wrote this piece. He has done some work in AI and computer vision, and he had the opportunity here to write a piece that reflected that expertise. Instead he made a rather facile point that is similar to saying &quot;Graffiti isn&#x27;t art.&quot; That argument won&#x27;t lead anywhere interesting.<p>He rehashes the Chomsky-ian argument about meaning. That AI&#x27;s won&#x27;t understand meaning until they can connect representations to the world. Then he makes the point that this requires embodiment, that they have a physical body in space through which they connect to the world. I don&#x27;t believe either of these are necessary requirements for AI.<p>An AI that solves a lot of problems better than humans, and transfers that learning across many problems with relative ease, is getting close to strong AI. It doesn&#x27;t really matter whether the machine constructs meaning to itself or not. It doesn&#x27;t have to be humanlike to be strong. Secondly, AIs can train perfectly well in virtual environments. They don&#x27;t have to be embodied as robots to be considered strong. We can model the world with enough complexity to give AIs problems that, if solved, might define them as strong.