This is a work in progress, essentially my “manifesto” on what I think constitutes intelligence. It is a summation of the reading and talks I have ingested and cogitated on for a while.
My need to get things down in a coherent set of words was motivated by my evolving dissatisfaction with the term “artificial intelligence”, which has become a marketing term used by spivs more than something grounded in academic rigour. This is part of my fight back. It is important to be clear on what we know has intelligence to avoid being taken in by the spivs talking about “Artificial General Intelligence”.
I also paid heed to Francis Bacon’s famous aphorism about “reading maketh the full man……and writing an exact man”. It’s difficult to pull the various strands together from the differing literature and arenas of conference.
I am coming from this from a biological and neurological angle. I started from a belief that humans are intelligent, most animals are probably intelligent, and a pocket calculator is not intelligent. I started from a medical belief in embodied intelligence, that the brain as the substrate of intelligence is not separate from the blood, circulating biochemical, spinal cord, nerves, autonomic nervous system, heart, limbs and other organs. This is something humans, imbued with intelligence, share with animals and do not share with pocket calculators or data centres.
I wondered about adding the word “autonomous” to this description of intelligence but I have not got reading extensively on free will yet because it’s a huge topic.
I will add my reading and viewing list so far as I go on (some skim read, and others more fully digested, as Bacon suggested one should do when faced with lots to read):
Legg and Hutter 2007. Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence. Actually I only came across this the other day after I created my description of intelligence. I am still reading this, but it covers much of my independently derived thoughts, although they do not come at it from a wet science (ie embodied biological entities in an environment, at risk of death if they just try to achieve goals) background.