
Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning - helloworld
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning.html
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symplee
As if humans haven't also hit the barrier of meaning? And yet we've still made
unimaginable discoveries. I almost added the word "progress" but I guess that
depends on what you find meaningful.

The article states: "But ultimately, the goal of developing _trustworthy_ A.I.
will require a deeper investigation into our own remarkable abilities and new
insights into the cognitive mechanisms we ourselves use to reliably and
robustly understand the world."

Why limit the field to the capacity of humans? What the author calls
"remarkable abilities" and "robustly understand[ing] the world" can also be
seen as just reproducing our own innate and learned collective human biases.
Our theories from observation, and their unprecedented ability to predict
future events, is more about describing the world vs understanding it. Is
there any topic in the world that doesn't have contrary _interpretations_?

What quantifiable metric would we even use to gauge artificial intelligence's
grasp of "meaning"? We don't even have one for our own.

