Something I hear a lot in debates about AI are variations of: “sure, this chatbot can [do online research, tutor you in chemistry, search for drug candidates, …], but it’s not really intelligent.”
A very similar sentiment was common in the 1960s and ’70s when electronic computers were becoming widespread. “Sure, it can solve thousands of equations in one second, but it’s not really intelligent.”
We would have previously said such a performance would make a person extraordinarily intelligent, but we needed to un-bundle this capability of super speedy calculation from “intelligence” so that the word could keep its everyday meaning as “what only humans can do”. The field of artificial intelligence has thus been getting the “intelligence” rug pulled out from under it for decades, as we discovered how to make computers ever smarter.
If “intelligence” is defined as mental abilities that only humans have, then saying that a chatbot is “not really intelligent” is a tautology — one equals one. We figured out how to make a computer do it and thus it no longer fits in this definition of “intelligent”. It’s an utterly boring statement that doesn’t tell us anything about the more impactful questions of how this technology will affect the world.
In order to have more meaningful conversations about the new capabilities of AI systems, we need to get more comfortable with the un-bundling of intelligence and stop getting distracted by words whose meanings have become ambiguous in the computer age.