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The Constructability of Artificial Intelligence - Bruce Edmonds

4. The Social Nature of Intelligence


All this points to a deeper consequence of the adoption of the TT as the criterion for intelligence. The TT, as specified, is far more than a way to short-cut philosophical quibbling, for it implicates the social roots of the phenomena of intelligence. This is perhaps not very surprising given that common usage of the term `intelligence' typically occurs in a social context, indicating the likely properties of certain interactions (as in the animal trapping example above).

This is some distance from the usual conception of intelligence that prevails in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which seems overly influenced by the analogy of the machine (particularly the Turing Machine). This is a much abstracted version of the original social concept and, I would claim, a much impoverished one. Recent work has started to indicate that the social situation might be as important to the exhibition of intelligent behaviour as the physical situation (Edmonds and Dautenhahn, 1998).

This interpretation of intelligence is in contrast to others (e.g. French, 1989) who criticise the TT on the grounds that it is only a test for human intelligence. I am arguing that this humanity is an important aspect of a test for meaningful intelligence, because this intelligence is an aspect of and arises out of a social ability and the society that concerns us in a human one. Thus my position is similar to Dennett's `intentional stance' (Dennett, 1987) in that I am characterising `intelligence' as a characteristic that it is useful to impute onto entities because it helps us predict and understand their behaviour. My analysis of the TT goes some way to suppport this. It is for those who wish to drastically abstract from this to explain what they mean by intelligence - in what way their conception is useful and what domain their definition relates to (typically more abstract versions of intelligence are grounded in `toy' problem domains).

It is nice to think that Turing's 1950 paper may come to influence academics back to considering the social roots of intelligence, and thus counter one effect of his other famous paper fouteen years earlier.


The Constructability of Artificial Intelligence - Bruce Edmonds - 17 JUN 99
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