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According to Thomas S. Kuhn in his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

...'normal science' presupposes a conceptual and instrumental framework or paradigm accepted by an entire scientific community ... [T]he resulting mode of scientific practice inevitably invokes 'crises' which cannot be resolved within this framework...

...the analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unobtainable in the laboratory.

For the 70 years since inception, AI has made no significant progress towards its original goal of human-like general intelligence in a machine (electronic digital computer). Forty years ago John Searle first published his Chinese room thought experiment that (along with associated arguments) concludes that the computer for a fundamental reason is incapable of human-like intelligence. The argument still stands - plenty of attempted rebuttals but none widely accepted as successful.

Does the Chinese room thought experiment "expose the old paradigm [computationalism] to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unobtainable in the laboratory"? Is AI in a Crisis of Science? Will it only make progress towards AGI when it adopts a different and better paradigm for understanding the device it calls the computer?

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    "For the 70 years since inception, AI has made no significant progress towards its original goal of human-like general intelligence in a machine" False. In the past 10 years there have been huge strides forward in machine learning. AlphaStar allows computers to play a complex strategy game that for a long time had been the holy grail of reinforcement learning. GPT3 allows computers to generate realistic text based on a writing prompt.
    – causative
    Apr 29, 2021 at 7:13
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    There remain flaws, but it's still very significant progress.
    – causative
    Apr 29, 2021 at 7:28
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    Systems and virtual minds replies to the Chinese Room are pretty broadly accepted among AI researchers. In that field, at least, CR is not taken seriously for a while now. It is similar to (and correlates with) attitudes towards the hard problem of consciousness, those of the more scientific persuasion do not see it as cogent. It is not that the argument still stands, but rather that it became clear that it depends on certain articles of faith that are perennially unresolvable, and is orthogonal to progress or lack thereof in the AI field.
    – Conifold
    Apr 29, 2021 at 7:57
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    "The computer for a fundamental reason is incapable of human-like intelligence" is not something that Searle believes or was trying to argue, unless by "the computer" you only mean the particular computer in the Chinese room argument. He was only arguing that you can't take a purely functionalist approach to deciding whether a machine understands what it's doing. Even if correct, the argument doesn't imply that we can never make a machine that genuinely understands Chinese.
    – benrg
    Apr 29, 2021 at 17:15
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    You might be interested in: a) What computers can't do and b) What computers still can't do
    – Nikos M.
    Apr 8 at 14:32

5 Answers 5

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Your question appears to be ill informed.

Neural networks. Image processing, through layered convolutional neural networks. Natural language processing by Watson (able to beat humans at Jeopardy). Deep Blue, Alpha Go, and Alpha Zero, able to beat humans at some of our most complex games. Tegmark-&-Wu's AI Physicist.

These are all substantial steps, proven in practice.

What we have discovered, is that what our brains do is a lot more complex than we thought. Image processing in particular, turned out to be a lot harder than expected initially.

It's important to distinguish between Artificial Intelligence, which is already ubiquitous, and Artificial General Intelligence or synthetic sentience, which we just don't know when will be possible - it has seemed 'a few decades away' for probably at least a century.

Hofstadter's strange-loops model alone can potentially account for minds being different to Chinese-rooms. Discussed here What is intelligence?

Personally, I am with Penrose-Hammeroff & OrchOR. That interpretation does not necessarily require quantum effects, but it does involve emergent dynamics ('orchestration').

On the paradigms, from my post in that linked discussion:

There is a powerful tendency for people in science and computing to think there is nothing very interesting or special about human minds. And unfortunately, a powerful strand in philosophy (& theology) which says there is something so special about them, scientists aren't on track to figuring them out - the 'qualia' idea and the so called Hard Problem Of Consciousness. I strongly recommend not joining either camp. The story of physics has been from thinking we were a few results away from explaining everything in 1900, and now we don't know what 95% of the universe is made of - our greatest progress has been to begin understanding the scope of our ignorance. I feel strongly we are on a similar trajectory about intelligence.

Your question is like saying, 'There hasn't been much progress in physics lately, so probably we won't be able to explain everything'. Ie, both wrong, and misguided, in a way that people familiar with the subject will have very little patience for.

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    "Comically ill informed" is a violation of the rules of this forum. An insult in high-brow language is still an insult. Apr 29, 2021 at 18:10
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    I have edited it down. Apr 29, 2021 at 18:53
  • CriglCragl mentions Watson winning at Jeopardy as evidence of general intelligence in current computers. I don't suppose it would help to note that Watson didn't "know" that the wife of a US president was female.
    – Roddus
    May 16, 2021 at 23:16
  • @Roddus: Arguing natural language processing isn't progress, is like arguing image processing isn't progress.
    – CriglCragl
    May 17, 2021 at 12:35
  • @CriglCragl “Arguing natural language processing isn't progress, is like arguing image processing isn't progress”. If NLP is statistics on a mega data set then I'd say it's not progress. Work was done on this about 30 years ago by Eugene Charniak. The questions asked of the machine tested generality, or abstraction. I think his conclusions still stand.
    – Roddus
    May 19, 2021 at 0:46
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For CriglCragl and the common view expressed, I think CC is actually demonstrating that AI is indeed in a crisis of science. CC says the idea that AI is in a crisis of science is:

both wrong, and misguided, in a way that people familiar with the subject will have very little patience for.

(I presume CC's original opening line “"You question appears to be comically ill informed" indicates that they fully believe they are indeed among those familiar with the subject.)

But as everyone knows, a crisis of science comes about precisely because a research programme has failed to make fundamental progress, and a thought experiment exposes that failure in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unobtainable in the laboratory.

CC agrees there is a fundamental failure:

Artificial General Intelligence [-] we just don't know when [it] will be possible

If CC understands the CRA then they know it exposes this failure by appeal to the fundamental nature of computation. (No one seems to be denying computation is the purely syntactic manipulation of symbols without accessing their meanings.)

And the third ingredient of any crisis of science is that the Illuminati can't conceive of themselves as being wrong; and because of their psychological dependence on unbridled falsehood react emotionally to any suggestion of error.

So I think CC's comment which expresses a common view within AI is quite a clear answer to my question: YES, AI is in a crisis of science.

About the CRA, this is the key thing to me, and it addresses some other of the comments above. The CRA can be boiled down to just one issue: the intrinsic meaninglessness of the symbol. If you say computers manipulate symbols and do nothing else (as Searle does) and given that symbols in themselves say nothing about what they mean, then the computer is forever a prisoner in a universe of meaningless syntax and formality. The system reply, the many mansions reply, the robot reply, all the replies are beside the point. Unless the inherent meaningless of the symbol can be overcome, computers will never be intelligent. This is Searle's core position and I think is clearly a crisis.

Just for the sake of completeness, I've been given a -1 score. Because of this sort of unhelpful and I have to say in a sense arrogant thing I gave up on PSE a while ago and switched to academia.edu. A few days ago I posted exactly the same question there in the form of a short paper. The second respondent was Pat Hayes, AI royalty, who answered with well-thought-out and constructive arguments, as of course one would expect. In all the comments there was no beating of the hairless chest. I'm sure PSE gives good guidance to novices, but I think it's simply wrong to expect balanced debate (Crigl please take note).

According to the voting balloon, a negative vote means "The question does not show any research effort". So (to cut and paste some recent relevant research effort):

...despite seven decades of prodigious funding and effort, nothing approaching AGI has been demonstrated. Instead, serious practical and theoretical difficulties have arisen including those known as the problem of design (1), the problem of machine translation (2), the frame problem (3), the problem of common-sense knowledge (4), the problem of combinatorial explosion (5), the Chinese room argument (6), the infinity of facts (7), the symbol grounding problem (8), and the problem of encodingism (9). And for "deep learning": edge cases (10), noisy data-sets (11) adversarial attack (12) and catastrophic forgetting (13).

  1. Ada Lovelace, 1843, "Note G", quoted in "The Turing Test," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, section 2.6, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test. Also see John von Neumann, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC," (Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 30 June 1945), 1
  2. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, "The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages," in Advances in Computers, ed. Franz L. Alt (Academic Press, 1960), 1: 91-163.
  3. J. McCarthy and P. J. Hayes, "Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint to Artificial Intelligence," in Bernard Meltzer and Donald Michie (eds.) Machine Intelligence 4 (American Elsevier, 1969), 463-502. Also see Dreyfus, "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," 29, 39, 68.
  4. Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," (The RAND Corporation, P-3244, December 1965), 39.
  5. James Lighthill, "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey," section 3 Conclusion, in Artificial Intelligence: A Paper Symposium (Science Research Council of Great Britain, July 1972). Also Dreyfus, "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," 39.
  6. John R. Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417-457.
  7. Dreyfus, "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," 39. Also Daniel C. Dennett, "Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI," in The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, ed. Zenon W. Pylyshyn (1984; Ablex, 1987), 49.
  8. Stevan Harnad, “The Symbol Grounding Problem,” Physica D 42 (June 1990): 335-346.
  9. Mark Bickhard and Lauren Terveen, Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence: Impasse and Solution (Elsevier, 1995).
  10. Overview of issues: Philip Koopman, "Edge Cases and Autonomous Vehicle Safety," (paper presented at the Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, Bristol UK, 7 February 2019).
  11. Overview of literature: Gupta, Shivani and Gupta, Atul, "Dealing with Noise Problem in Machine Learning Data-sets: A Systematic Review," Procedia Computer Science 161 (Elsevier, 2019): 466-474.
  12. Survey: Anirban Chakraborty et al., "Adversarial Attacks and Defences: A Survey," (arXiv:1810.00069v1, 28 September 2018).
  13. James Kirkpatrick et al., "Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks," Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences 114, no. 13, (2017): 3521-3526.
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    @CriglCragl Well, we don't understand intelligence either, but that doesn't mean it can't be explained. But what it does mean is that computation is not an adequate explanation. If it was then instead of 70 years of abject failure to demonstrate human-like general intelligence, there would have been more or less steady progress. David Deutsch reiterates this in his 3 October 2012 Guardian article. Asserting there is an emotional denial by the luminaries isn't a daft thing, and has been made by many. How else do you explain 70 years of abject failure, yet continued embrace of computationalism?
    – Roddus
    May 15, 2021 at 1:24
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    @CriglCragl Putting aside ad hominem issues, what about the key question: if computationalism is right, why is there still, after 70 years, no idiomatic conversation, ability to generalize, or common-sense knowledge? This is really a fundamental issue. The second key question being, if symbols in themselves are meaningless, how could a purely syntactic device such as a computer understand what it manipulates?
    – Roddus
    May 16, 2021 at 22:56
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    Because those things aren't fundamental, they are high level and emergent. Your stance is like saying, making insects from scratch wouldn't be progress on how to make humans. There isn't a discontinuity between us and insects, only gradual improvements. Meaning and concepts emerged from biological soup, and will do from electron soup.
    – CriglCragl
    May 17, 2021 at 12:40
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    You might be interested in: a) What computers can't do and b) What computers still can't do
    – Nikos M.
    Apr 8 at 14:32
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    @Nikos M. I agree that both those Dreyfus' books (and the Dreyfus and Dreyfus book) are important. You might know that H. Dreyfus was at MIT with Minsky etc. and after his "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" he was punished with the greatest sanction possible: no longer being invited to lunch (petty, but I think it revealed insecurity and failure). I think Heidegger is basically right about several things, but also I think that his conception of being "in" the world or "of" the world can be realized in a computer as a theory of mind, but not computationally.
    – Roddus
    Apr 10 at 23:42
2

If you don't mean in some weaker sense of challenging basic terms in AI research ('consciousness') then the onus is on you to show that there is Kuhn's "incommensurability" between the old and new AI

Newton’s theory was initially widely rejected because it did not explain the attractive forces between matter, something required of any mechanics from the perspective of the proponents of Aristotle and Descartes’ theories (Kuhn 1962, 148). According to Kuhn, with the acceptance of Newton’s theory, this question was banished from science as illegitimate, only to re-emerge with the solution offered by general relativity. He concluded that scientific revolutions alter the very definition of science itself.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incommensurability/

The upshot is that the pre and post revolution scientist are using different languages with the same terms, so that

revolutions change what counts as the facts in the first place.

In effect I know nothing about AI, but I am skeptical. Given we've more or less debunked the Turing Test, you might disagree. But is deep blue any more or less sentient than it was?

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  • I agree Newtonian physics altered science itself in that the causation-by-contact doctrine of the traditional mechanical model was dismissed by Newtonian forces. But postulating then empirically supporting the existence of forces (whatever they are) seems within the same "definition" of science. It was the likes of Popper who altered the definition of science. At present, psychology and AI (Russel & Norvig etc.) are using same terms with very different meanings (eg "reasoning", "representation", "perception"), but without pre- and post-revolution. AI likely needs new terms with new meanings.
    – Roddus
    Apr 11 at 0:03
  • Maybe @Roddus . As I said, I know in effect nothing about AI. I've read Kuhn, hence my answer. And I hope it was helpful. Cheers
    – user65545
    Apr 11 at 0:06
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You are right, there is a crisis in science, which reflects the crisis of human understanding. Consider this argument by Daniel Dennett:

enter image description here

It proposes that we humans too can rely on the Chinese room in our brains to live our lives without much understanding.

This is possible because our psyche consists of two minds. Daniel Kahneman of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" referred to the two as System 1 and System 2. Mark Manson of "Everything is f*cked: A book about hope" referred to them as the Feeling Brain and the Thinking Brain respectvely.1

System 1 mostly lives in subconsciousness. It is responsible for learning John Locke's "simple ideas" and intuition, and it communicates to us through feelings. Its design is of a machine learning AI (of the Chinese room).

System 2 can understand by discovering interactive models of the Reality ("complex ideas"). That's what the real science is about -- Newton discovering the universal gravity in his imagination, Copernicus and Galileo discovering modern cosmology, Steven Hawkins discovering how black-holes evaporate -- even though to this day no one has seen one.2

Machine learning AI, therefore, simulates human intuition. And the irony is that we, in our current state, are not that different. We still don't know how to teach everyone, consistently and reliably, the art of understanding. So, in a typical person, System 2 is not working all that well, forcing them to rely, instead, on the intuitions of System 1. This -- the crisis of understanding -- has been repeatedly identified3 as the problem at the root of all evils.

 

1 Many older sources describe the same dichotomy. In Sigmund Freud's model, System 1 is id/superego and System 2 is ego. This, in turn, matches the Socrates' Chariot Allegory -- id being the dark horse, superego the white one, and ego as the charioteer, such as it is. Buddha used the parable of a person (System 2) riding an elephant (System 1) to describe the same idea.

2 That's why Hawking was never awarded a Nobel Prize. And neither was Einstein, at least not for his discovery of General Relativity. Newton wouldn't be awarded either. That reflects of our misunderstanding of what the real science is about.

3 Take Socrates alluding to knowledge being the only true virtue, for example. Or Spinoza.

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  • Interesting discussion. However, we ran into limits to understanding trying to build computers and algorithms based on our algorithmic virtual system 2 reasoning. The neural net analog programming of our most recent AI, is an effort to replicate the non-algorithmic intuitions of our unconscious system 1. So we now HAVE both systems in our AI, but our computers still don't have understanding. Nor do our computers have consciousness. Getting both computational approaches still doesn't yield understanding or consciousness.
    – Dcleve
    Apr 8 at 18:11
  • That's true, classic computers didn't have any understanding of their own: Their algorithms encoded the understanding of their programmers. And while it should be possible to design an AGI that would discover its own understanding, to me that's a mute point. Why focus on AI when we have our own potential largely untapped? As it stands, relatively few individuals manage to attain a more comprehensive understanding of the world (e.g. Socrates, Jesus, or Nietzsche) and most of them are traumatized by their aloneness. By living in the world that neither understands, nor seems to care. Apr 8 at 18:54
  • +1 "Machine learning AI, therefore, simulates human intuition." Connectionist models are a class of their own removed from symbolic systems.
    – J D
    Apr 8 at 20:38
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    … which is to say that the art of understanding (of System 2 operation) should be taught explicitly. Otherwise it’s touch and go. Apr 9 at 0:40
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    Why focus on developing airplanes when most people can't run very well? I think that AI is just completely separate from whether people are educated properly or not. We can't wait until everyone has enough of everything before developing something new, or we would still be trying to get enough whale oil before creating the electric light bulb. Are light bulbs helpful? Did they do more good than harm?
    – Scott Rowe
    Apr 9 at 1:53
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The weakness in the argument presented by the OP resides squarely here:

AI has made no significant progress towards its original goal of human-like general intelligence in a machine.

By what measure can we conclude no progress has been made? Cars can drive themsevles, Boston Dynamics has robots that hang drywall, ML systems can decide fallibly that it's looking at a picture of a dog, and ChatGPT now will dispossess a new generation of human labor because it can create language products that used to require flesh and blood persons. Should we take this claim as definitive because computers haven't seized control of society marching us off to permanent detention center meant to harvest the electricity from our bodies like in the Matrix??? Nonsense.

AI continues to make progress at aspects of human-level intelligence, and every aspect that is accomplished indeed contributes to putting together a system that approaches functionality that can be described as human-level. There's a certain homunculus-like presumption at play here that there is something magically human inside the brain that is not present inside of machines, and that no amount of aggregating computation will every approach that elan vital. This is the same feeble attack that the Chinese Room levels at human intelligence by trying to show that human thought is somehow a language of thought, as opposed to embracing a broader embodied, connectionist model of cognition.

There is no doubt that our systems of computation pale in comparison to the human brain presiding over the biochemical signaling of the body. But like the Ship of Theseus, what makes us us is not the planks, which are cleverly being pulled apart, explored, and replaced with electromechanical substitutes. There is something in crisis, but it's not the field of AI, it's the classical notions of computationalism that presume that thought is a language and that physical symbol systems are enough. They simply are not, and up and coming thinkers will posit better philosophical explanations, one's that will enable the continued advance of AI development.

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    @StevanV.Saban "We thought we were unbeatable, at chess, Go, shogi. All these games, they have been gradually pushed to the side [by increasingly powerful AI programs]. But it doesn't mean that life is over. We have to find out how we can turn it to our advantage." This is the just the tale of John Henry adapted for the modern audience. :D
    – J D
    Apr 11 at 19:12
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    @StevanV.Saban I'd argue it depends on the intentions of the people who control the economy who inevitably tend to use such economic power to give themselves more economic power. Thus, the displacement is a social phenomenon more than a technical one. Take trucks that drive themselves. 3 million truckers might lose their job... or 3 million truckers might now have a job of stewarding 3 million autonomous trucks. The decision will be one society makes.
    – J D
    Apr 11 at 20:11
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    I agree but it will also force a reexamination of the full role of a truck driver and evaluate the level of intelligence needed for all tasks. There will always be an intelligence limiting step that will define the maximum intelligence required and a cost for that intelligence. For example, human drivers are better at discouraging car-jacking or cargo theft than an automated driving bot and there is an intelligence cost associated with that task.
    – user64314
    Apr 12 at 0:08
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    @ScottRowe That'll depend on the people who control the AI. Those in control have a vested interest in maintaining control. National healthcare is superior to US healthcare by almost every measure EXCEPT for the wealthy whose wealth provides them the best of everything. That it comes at the cost of the indigent is often not their concern.
    – J D
    Apr 13 at 1:47
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    @ScottRowe There are two definitions of a better job: One that provides a comfortable lifestyle for the employee and one that makes more money for the employer. The "best" jobs do both. I believe that is how the power of AI can be best used.
    – user64314
    Apr 13 at 1:51

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