Strong AI - Requirements

Requirements

Many different definitions of intelligence have been proposed (such as being able to pass the Turing test) but there is to date no definition that satisfies everyone. However, there is wide agreement among artificial intelligence researchers that intelligence is required to do the following:

• reason, use strategy, solve puzzles, and make judgments under uncertainty;
• represent knowledge, including commonsense knowledge;
• plan;
• learn;
• communicate in natural language;
• and integrate all these skills towards common goals.

Other important capabilities include the ability to sense (e.g. see) and the ability to act (e.g. move and manipulate objects) in the world where intelligent behaviour is to be observed. This would include an ability to detect and respond to hazard. Some sources consider "salience" (the capacity for recognising importance) as an important trait. Salience is thought to be part of how humans evaluate novelty so are likely to be important in some degree, but not necessarily at a human level. Many interdisciplinary approaches to intelligence (e.g. cognitive science, computational intelligence and decision making) tend to emphasise the need to consider additional traits such as imagination (taken as the ability to form mental images and concepts that were not programmed in) and autonomy. Computer based systems that exhibit many of these capabilities do exist (e.g. see computational creativity, automated reasoning, decision support system, robot, evolutionary computation, intelligent agent), but not yet at human levels.

There are other aspects of the human mind besides intelligence that are relevant to the concept of strong AI which play a major role in science fiction and the ethics of artificial intelligence:

• consciousness: To have subjective experience and thought.
• self-awareness: To be aware of oneself as a separate individual, especially to be aware of one's own thoughts.
• sentience: The ability to "feel" perceptions or emotions subjectively.
• sapience: The capacity for wisdom.

These traits have a moral dimension, because a machine with this form of strong AI may have legal rights, analogous to the rights of animals. Also, Bill Joy, among others, argues a machine with these traits may be a threat to human life or dignity. It remains to be shown whether any of these traits are necessary for strong AI. The role of consciousness is not clear, and currently there is no agreed test for its presence. If a machine is built with a device that simulates the neural correlates of consciousness, would it automatically have self-awareness? It is also possible that some of these properties, such as sentience, naturally emerge from a fully intelligent machine, or that it becomes natural to ascribe these properties to machines once they begin to act in a way that is clearly intelligent. For example, intelligent action may be sufficient for sentience, rather than the other way around.