Computer engineer Eric Holloway: Artificial intelligence is impossible
Holloway distinguishes between meaningful information and artificial intelligence: What is meaningful information, and how does it relate to the artificial intelligence question? First, let’s start with Claude Shannon’s definition of information. Shannon (1916–2001), a mathematician and computer scientist, stated that an event’s information content is the negative logarithm* of its probability. So, if I flip a coin, I generate 1 bit of information, according to his theory. The coin came down heads or tails. That’s all the information it provides. However, Shannon’s definition of information does not capture our intuition of information. Suppose I paid money to learn a lot of information at a lecture and the lecturer spent the whole session flipping a coin and calling out the result. Read More ›