Related papers: Do Artificial Intelligence Systems Understand?
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine…
Some defenders of so-called `artificial intelligence' believe that machines can understand language. In particular, S{\o}gaard has argued in this journal for a thesis of this sort, on the basis of the idea (1) that where there is semantics…
One goal of Artificial Intelligence is to learn meaningful representations for natural language expressions, but what this entails is not always clear. A variety of new linguistic behaviours present themselves embodied as computers,…
The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or consciousness has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the…
Artificial Intelligence models are becoming increasingly more powerful and accurate, supporting or even replacing humans' decision making. But with increased power and accuracy also comes higher complexity, making it hard for users to…
The consciousness standing for artificial intelligence divides opinions across epistemological positions. Whether or not machines can be conscious, and whether we can ascertain the truth of such a proposition for any given case, has…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have achieved human-scale speed and accuracy for classification tasks. In turn, these capabilities have made AI a viable replacement for many human activities that at their core involve…
As artificially intelligent systems become more anthropomorphic and pervasive, and their potential impact on humanity more urgent, discussions about the possibility of machine consciousness have significantly intensified, and it is…
Can we train a machine to detect if another machine has understood a concept? In principle, this is possible by conducting tests on the subject of that concept. However we want this procedure to be done by avoiding direct questions. In…
Without an agreed-upon definition of intelligence, asking "is this system intelligent?"" is an untestable question. This lack of consensus hinders research, and public perception, on Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly since the rise…
Explainability and comprehensibility of AI are important requirements for intelligent systems deployed in real-world domains. Users want and frequently need to understand how decisions impacting them are made. Similarly it is important to…
Can machines truly think? This question and its answer have many implications that depend, in large part, on any number of assumptions underlying how the issue has been addressed or considered previously. A crucial question, and one that is…
In order to construct an ethical artificial intelligence (AI) two complex problems must be overcome. Firstly, humans do not consistently agree on what is or is not ethical. Second, contemporary AI and machine learning methods tend to be…
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possibilities for computing machinery, or AI agents, to know and to possess knowledge. This is done mainly from a virtue epistemology perspective and definition of knowledge. However, this inquiry…
Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…
This paper studies the question on whether machines can be rational. It observes the existing reasons why humans are not rational which is due to imperfect and limited information, limited and inconsistent processing power through the brain…
One of the main research areas in Artificial Intelligence is the coding of agents (programs) which are able to learn by themselves in any situation. This means that agents must be useful for purposes other than those they were created for,…
Machines are being increasingly used in decision-making processes, resulting in the realization that decisions need explanations. Unfortunately, an increasing number of these deployed models are of a 'black-box' nature where the reasoning…
While many see the prospect of autonomous machines as threatening, autonomy may be exactly what we want in a superintelligent machine. There is a sense of autonomy, deeply rooted in the ethical literature, in which an autonomous machine is…