Kaplan, Artificial Intelligence Chapter 1

Why is the question "What is artificial intelligence?" easy to ask but hard to answer?

-First, there is little agreement about what intelligence is. -Second, there's scant reason to believe that machine intelligence bears much relationship to human intelligence, at least so far.

When scoring students' performances on sums, we don't take into account how they performed the work—we presume they used only their native brains and the necessary tools like pencil and paper. So why do we care when we substitute a machine as the test subject?

Because we take it for granted that a human performing this task is using certain innate or learned abilities that in principle can be brought to bear on a broad range of comparable problems of interest. However, we lack confidence that a machine demonstrating the same or superior performance on this task indicates anything of the kind.

What concept is roughly aligned with the many proposed definitions of artificial intelligence?

Creating computer programs or machines capable of behavior we would regard as intelligent if exhibited by humans.

Can a computer ever really be smarter than a human being?

In a word, yes—but most likely in limited ways. It's possible that at some point in the future public sentiment will have shifted sufficiently to accept the idea that computers are in general superior to humans in some fairly broad classes of intellectual tasks, but this doesn't mean that machines will dominate or obsolete us

Who described the process of artificial intelligence as "that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving."?

John McCarthy

What's another problem with using human capabilities as a yardstick for AI.

Machines are able to perform lots of tasks that people can't do at all, and many such performances certainly feel like displays of intelligence.

Why is the John McCarthy approach to artificial intelligence deeply flawed?

The difficulty of defining, much less measuring, human intelligence. Our standards for comparing human intelligence may not be applicable to a machine.

What is Jerry Kaplan's personal view of the meaning of AI.

The essence of AI—indeed, the essence of intelligence—is the ability to make appropriate generalizations in a timely fashion based on limited data.