philosophy of artificial intelligence

The part of philosophy concerned with what 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. is, what it presupposes and what follows from it, drawing on philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science and ethics. Its classic questions are whether machines can think, as Alan Turing asked in 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.; whether running a program could suffice for understanding or consciousness (strong AIstrong AI, n.: Originally, the claim that a computer running the right program would literally have a mind and understand, not just imitate understanding. Today it often simply means AI as capable as humans across the board., the Chinese roomChinese room, n.: A thought experiment: a person who knows no Chinese follows a rulebook to answer Chinese messages so well that outsiders think they understand. If the person doesn't understand, does a computer running a program?, functionalismfunctionalism, n.: The view that minds are defined by how they work, not what they are made of: pain, for example, is whatever inner state plays pain's part, linking injury, other thoughts and behavior.); how symbols acquire meaning (symbol grounding problemsymbol grounding problem, n.: The puzzle of how words or symbols inside a machine can mean anything by themselves, rather than only pointing to more symbols — like a dictionary that defines every word using other words., intentionalityintentionality, n.: The way thoughts, beliefs and desires are about things: a belief is about rain, a wish is for cake. Philosophers ask whether a machine's internal states can be about anything.); and whether there are principled limits to machine intelligence (Lucas–Penrose argumentLucas–Penrose argument, n.: An argument that human minds cannot be computers because, using a famous result in logic, people can see that certain statements are true that no fixed computer program could prove., Dreyfus's critique of AIDreyfus's critique of AI, n.: The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus's argument, from the 1960s on, that rule-based AI could never match human intelligence, because much human skill rests on bodily know-how and intuition rather than explicit rules.). Since the arrival of large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. it has turned to whether such systems understand, reason, hold beliefs or have world modelsworld model, n.: An AI's internal simulation of how its world works, which lets it predict what will happen next — especially in response to its own actions — and so plan, imagine or practice without acting for real., whether they could be consciousmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine. or moral patientsmoral patienthood, n.: Being the kind of being whose interests matter morally for its own sake, so that it can be wronged. Babies and animals count, even though they are not responsible for what they do., and how to interpret scientific claims about them, such as reports of emergenceemergence, n.: When a whole shows properties or abilities that none of its parts has and that are hard to predict from them — like a traffic jam arising from individual cars, or new skills appearing in larger AI models.. Ethical and political questions are usually treated under AI ethicsAI ethics, n.: The study of what is right and wrong in how AI is built and used: who it may harm, who is responsible when it fails, and which values it should respect..