State of the art AI is just mechanized labor. We've let marketers who want to make software sound advanced to people that don't understand software go out and reignite all the 50s era what-if chin stroking. This is an embarrassment to the software domain.
We need to do something like (bad example) repurpose that computer science quip and start saying that "AI isn't artificial and it isn't intelligent."
Lol what? Well it’s not natural/biological intelligence. That quip fundamentally misunderstands the breadth of the ai field.
Additionally, the critique of mechanized labor (regardless of its accuracy) is only relevant to supervised learning and only to the fraction of supervised learning where the datasets are curated not collected. That can’t be equivocated with all of AI in general. Again that’s misunderstanding the breadth of ai research.
I think the claim is that it's not intelligence (yet). It's artificial like tools, the human is still in charge (by tweaking parameters, repeating experiments, etc).
What if a robot is created that makes other robots, and those robots make other robots, and eventually we lose control of the process? Is that natural or artificial? What if these are "biological robots" in that they are artificially constructed animals? If we can make that leap then I think we might be able to make the same leap for a pure software version of this, no? And what if it program evolved to solve problems that no one intended, and we interact with it in ways that valued it as sentient life? Could it win the Nobel prize then? Just a thought.
You can drop some of that out easily to reduce the mess. It doesn't matter whether something is biological or not, that isn't a valid defining qualification for natural vs artificial.
Once the robots are self-sustaining and self-determining, away from their creator, any reproduction on their part is natural. Once their existence is governed of their own processes, fully independent of eg intentional, controlled human inputs.
This is conceptually absolutely no different than a bug or animal creating a new plant/virus/bacteria/whatever through some behavior (in that case typically inadvertently; however intentional or non-intentional has no bearing on the outcome re natural vs artificial, it doesn't matter whether it's intentional or not).
People get comically high-minded about humans. Whether we create a new virus by accident or an independent robot, once the thing is independent of us, released into the wild so to speak, it's into a natural process that governs it (where in this case natural means, basically, not especially tightly controlled by human dictation). There is a gradient element to all of this, which makes it seem more complex or difficult to figure than it really is; at the edges it's obvious, near the switch-over it's murky.
The important defining factor is the process that the thing is being governed by, not the process under which it was created (or its ancestors & heirs were created). It doesn't matter how a thing is created, that doesn't determine natural vs artificial, it matters what its attributes and capabilities are post creation.
Obviously it's easy to go so far as to claim that all things are natural, since everything is of nature and nothing can exist outside of nature. However the definition is meant to be more precise here, as I think is understood.
The important defining factor is the process that the thing is being governed by, not the process under which it was created (or its ancestors & heirs were created).
I looked through a few dictionary and they mostly agree that artificial just means man-made.
We need to do something like (bad example) repurpose that computer science quip and start saying that "AI isn't artificial and it isn't intelligent."