Homework 3

            This could have been a very interesting paper had the author written it very differently. I did not like the style he wrote the paper and the way he explained his points. This paper was about minds brains and programs. What the paper was about was the author attempting to differentiate between strong and weak AI and explaining what he thought would be strong AI. Weak AI is mainly just a tool but according to the author strong AI is a mind and can learn and think for itself. He starts the paper by explaining in detail what he thinks the definition of strong AI. He mentions a something about humans understanding stories; he tells a story about a man in a restaurant and explains that even if something is not said in a story a human would be able to infer that something happened and that strong AI would be able to do the same thing.

            After that he explains a way that would test the theory, the way to test it is called the Chinese room. What that is is lock a person into a room who does not understand Chinese and you give them papers with Chinese writing on them. Then after this first batch of papers you are given a second batch but with this one you are given a sheet of rules on how to match up the symbols in English. To someone sitting outside the room it looks as if you understand Chinese and are able to read the stories that are presented. The point of this is to show the basic way programs would work in “understanding” things. In this situation you are the program, matching symbols with a list of rules and the user is the person giving you those symbols and rules.

            After this example and explanation the author decides to poll different people in the AI field as to what strong AI is exactly. Then he basically shoots everyone who replied down saying that he was right and there was no way that they were right. At one point he says “This objection really is only worth a short reply” and gives a very short paragraph of how he was right and that the reply was just pointless.

            The objection he said that to, in my opinion was actually one of the better ones, what it said was "How do you know that other people understand Chinese or anything else? Only by their behavior, now the computer can pass the behavioral tests as well as they can (in principle), so if you are going to attribute cognition to other people you must in principle also attribute it to computers.” This statement actually makes sense to me, what I get from it is that you don’t see the people understanding what you are saying or in what language you know by their behavior that they do in fact understand you and if a computer can do that then that means that the computer is understanding you.

            Overall I didn’t really like this paper, it was not well written and the author seemed like he didn’t care what the other people he polled said they were wrong and he was right. So that kind of took away from the paper and made it not a very good read for me.