AI succeeds where the skill required to win is massive calculation and the map IS the territory: Alone in the real world, it is helpless.
For example, take IBM Watson’s win at Jeopardy in 2011. As Larry L. Linenschmidt of Hill Country Institute has pointed out, “Watson had, it would seem, a built-in advantage then by having infinite—maybe not infinite but virtually infinite—information available to it to do those matches.”
Indeed. But Watson was a flop later in clinical medicine. That’s probably because computers only calculate and not everything in the practice of medicine in a real-world setting is a matter of calculation.
Not every human intellectual effort involves calculation. That’s why increases in computing power cannot solve all our problems. Computers are not creative and they do not tolerate ambiguity well. Yet success in the real world consists largely in mastering these non-computable areas.
Science fiction has dreamed that ramped-up calculation will turn computers into machines that can think like humans. But even the steepest, most impressive calculations do not suddenly become creativity, for the same reasons as maps do not suddenly become the real-world territory. To think otherwise is to believe in magic.
News, “Are computers that win at chess smarter than geniuses?” at Mind Matters News
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