The Chinese room argument!!!
Hi,
I was just reading some random stuff on Wikipedia when I stumbled upon this article.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Chinese Room</a>
In simple terms, the argument can be summarized as follows.
You are in a closed room. You understand nothing but English. You have an instruction manual of some sort. The manual is also in English. People outside the room write questions in Chinese on a paper and pass it to you. You refer to the instruction manual and write the answers (correct answers, by the way!!) to those questions and pass it out. In this way, you can actually carry out a meaningful conversation even though you don't know anything about Chinese.
Now, substitute yourself for a robot, the manual for a program and the questions in the paper to be the input. The robot gives some output using the manual. Now, does it amount to the machine actually understanding the question and actually thinking? Is the machine actually intelligent?
It seems to be a very strong argument against Strong AI - that it's possible for machines to actually understand something, that machines can actually think.
As I'm thinking about it, I do seem to concur with it. What do you think about this? Will true AI be ever possible?
I was just reading some random stuff on Wikipedia when I stumbled upon this article.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Chinese Room</a>
In simple terms, the argument can be summarized as follows.
You are in a closed room. You understand nothing but English. You have an instruction manual of some sort. The manual is also in English. People outside the room write questions in Chinese on a paper and pass it to you. You refer to the instruction manual and write the answers (correct answers, by the way!!) to those questions and pass it out. In this way, you can actually carry out a meaningful conversation even though you don't know anything about Chinese.
Now, substitute yourself for a robot, the manual for a program and the questions in the paper to be the input. The robot gives some output using the manual. Now, does it amount to the machine actually understanding the question and actually thinking? Is the machine actually intelligent?
It seems to be a very strong argument against Strong AI - that it's possible for machines to actually understand something, that machines can actually think.
As I'm thinking about it, I do seem to concur with it. What do you think about this? Will true AI be ever possible?
0