AlphaGo Is Not AI
The headline for this piece is clickbait. AlphaGo <i>is</i> AI, it's just not strong AI. No AI is strong AI for the moment, but that doesn'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'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 "Graffiti isn't art." That argument won't lead anywhere interesting.<p>He rehashes the Chomsky-ian argument about meaning. That AI's won'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'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't really matter whether the machine constructs meaning to itself or not. It doesn't have to be humanlike to be strong. Secondly, AIs can train perfectly well in virtual environments. They don'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.