machine intelligence
In plain wordsIntelligence shown by machines; another name for artificial intelligence, preferred by some because it does not suggest that such intelligence is fake.
Intelligent behavior exhibited by machines, or the field that studies it; largely a synonym of artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them.. Some authors prefer it because 'artificial' can suggest something counterfeit, and it was favored in Britain, notably at the University of Edinburgh, in the 1960s and 1970s. It survives in institutional names such as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (from 1979) and the journal Nature Machine Intelligence (from 2019), and in forecasting, where expert surveys ask when high-level machine intelligencehigh-level machine intelligence, n.: A yardstick used in surveys of AI researchers: the point at which machines on their own could outdo human workers at every task, in both quality and cost. will arrive, meaning unaided machines that can do every task better and more cheaply than human workers.
The essay argues that machine intelligence will not look like human intelligence even when it matches it.
Origin
Alan Turing wrote of 'intelligent machinery' in a 1948 report and a 1951 lecture. Donald Michie made 'machine intelligence' the name of a research tradition at the University of Edinburgh, directing its Experimental Programming Unit from its founding in 1965 (later the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception) and launching the Machine Intelligence workshop and book series in the mid-1960s.
Usage note
Usage follows fashion: some companies and researchers adopt 'machine intelligence' to distance their work from AI hype or science-fiction connotations. It is not a separate technical concept.
Related
- artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them.
- high-level machine intelligencehigh-level machine intelligence, n.: A yardstick used in surveys of AI researchers: the point at which machines on their own could outdo human workers at every task, in both quality and cost.
- Computing Machinery and IntelligenceComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children.
- intelligenceintelligence, n.: The ability to learn, understand, reason and solve problems — especially new ones — in order to reach goals. Experts disagree about how to define it precisely, for people and even more for machines.
- computational intelligencecomputational intelligence, n.: A family of AI methods inspired by nature, such as neural networks, fuzzy logic and evolutionary algorithms, that learn or adapt from numbers rather than following explicit logical rules.
- AI effectAI effect, n.: The habit of deciding that once a computer can do something — play chess, recognize speech, translate — it no longer counts as real intelligence, so the label keeps moving on to tasks machines cannot manage yet.
Mentioned in
Donald MichieDonald Michie, prop. n.: A British codebreaker turned AI pioneer who built a game-playing learning machine out of matchboxes and founded Edinburgh's influential machine-intelligence research group.