What level of complexity does a program need to have before you can claim that it is an Artificial Intelligence?
There’s a lot of questions along the lines of whether we should give legal recognition to AI etc. In Saudi Arabia they recognised an AI robot as a legal person.
Saudi Arabia becomes first country to make a robot into a citizen.
But before we can talk about legal rights for Artificial Intelligences we need to answer the question; can you define what is an AI?
From a smart phone to a laptop, from Siri and Cortana to Watson, from a Word spellchecker to a chess playing program, from a translation App to a Bot, from a spreadsheet with VBA behind it to an autopilot, from a driverless train to an ERP software suite like SAP, what the hades is AI? Is a robot automatically an AI? A driverless car? A car driven by a robot? A distributed internet intelligence like SkyNet? A digital programmable hearing aid?
Celestial Koan opts for a very simple definition. If the program has an ‘if’ statement in it, then it makes a decision based on input. That means its exhibiting artificial intelligence. It is adapting its behaviour as a consequence of a change or input from its environment, resulting from information. That’s AI.
That’s different to a mere physical change. A light switch lights up or doesn’t depending upon whether the switch is up or down. That’s just physics.
But when the decision is made based on information, that is intelligence.
Very basic intelligence, of course. But still, everything after that is really just a difference of degree.
It’s like life.
A single cell organism or a Human Being are both life. It’s just a difference of degree.
Anyhow, that’s one way of thinking about it. And that’s the definition we use on this site.
Probably not the answer readers wanted, but … I suggest that after that first conditional statement everything else is just an arbitrary point along a spectrum of complexity.
Hope this helps.