Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of AI (1969) [pdf]

I'm too dumb to understand any of this stuff re AI, but one thing occurred to me recently on the philosophical side of tech: When your life is closely intertwined w/ tech, you begin to almost solely view the world through the lens of progress and innovation. Progress and innovation often comes at the total expense of momentary awareness and satisfaction. Innovating becomes an expectation. It's just what comes next, that's it. That's a problem, generally speaking, IMO.

&gt;However, work on artificial intelligence, especially general intelligence, will be improved by a clearer idea of what intelligence is. One way is to give a purely behavioural or black-box definition. In this case we have to say that a machine is intelligent if it solves certain classes of problems requiring intelligence in humans, or survives in an intellectually demanding environment.<p>What if my expectation is that it be able to decide if an algorithm, given some inputs, will halt? Or being able to decide if a proposition is true within an axiomatic system? Maybe the better question is why Turing himself was optimistic about intelligent machines.

I like the paper. But it does not have much to do with the traditional canon of philosophical problems. Thankfully it does nothing more than set out a conceptual space in which the general theoretical framework of AI can be analysed. I guess that might be philosophical pragmatism, i.e. finding answers&#x2F;language sufficient to one&#x27;s needs and conditions. But there are no especially overt second-order epistemological&#x2F;ontological claims, e.g. such as figuring out what knowledge is or can be.

Thanks for posting the old paper. It’s a marvelous one that can help me think more clearly about intelligence.