Artificial intelligence is a term indicating several mathematical tools¹ or obfuscative rebrandings of existing knowledge through biological analogies and implementation technicalities².

I want to explain

• what in my opinion means to judge something 'intelligent'
• how do we get the confidence that something is intelligent
• why, to me, the frenzy on artificial intelligence and the associated millenaristic threats come from misunderstanding, volountarily or not, the meaning of the word 'intelligent', which seems to me to be used as a shorthand for 'efficient' and 'flexible'. Dr. Sepideh Pashami, whom I met at the talk in Vetenskapsfestivalen added 'creative' to this when I told her. The three words together still do not replace 'intelligent' in my opinion.

I will try to show this in the following.

The word intelligent comes from the Latin word intelligens, present participle of intellegere which is the contraction of inter (=between) and legere (=choose). Hence something is intelligent when it can discriminate, choose between different options, do something or something else or nothing. There are lots of things that seem to be able to discriminate: living beings, tools... which usually we don't deem intelligent. I will continue by refining a definition for intelligent in the attempt to match the usual and colloquial understanding of intelligent: tentatively, what makes the best decision to maximize his well being, of course depending upon the interpretation of 'best'. This definition implies the existence of a problem and a set of available actions that if performed cause a change in the world's current state. The presumed intelligent being must be aware of at least two such actions, otherwise no choice would be possible. Not acting is considered to be a choice.

Hence a being is intelligent only with respect to a problem it is trying to solve. A problem exists when you can imagine a state B of the world which is different from the current state A, and you want to reach B. Tentatively, let's say that the necessary condition to be intelligent is to be aware of a problem. This assumption is empirical in that I only know ways to measure intelligence by using problems. To be aware that there is a problem, shorthanded 👁, means being aware at once

• of a world, that is, the domain of the problem
• that there are 'states' of the world
• that there are actions
• that actions may have consequences upon the state of the world
• that there is choice

So being aware of the above is a necessary condition to being intelligent.

I also think that it is necessary that the being has

• judgement, to tell whether the problem is solved or not
• will

Judgement can be expressed as an action, and "acting upon judgement" as well, so I will consider it being part of the item ⚡ and not consider it separately.
What is will? Whatever makes a being want to solve, or not solve, a problem. More on this later. Consider implicitly 'will' as 'free will', unless I explicitly mark the difference between the two.

Hence

• awareness of a problem
• will

imply intelligence : 👁 ䷀ ⇒ 💡

Remember, the above concepts are just the device I am using to explain that there is something we can separate and analyze by verbal means. Rephrasing: I do not mean that something presumed intelligent must have a verbal formalization of 'problem' or 'state of the world' as I did explaining 🌍, ⚛, ⚡, ↷, ⚄ and ䷀.

Before using this definition to investigate reality and look for other intelligent beings, let's note that 👁 ䷀ ⇒ 💡 is acceptable as long as one applies it to oneself. After all what said above, some readers may agree that this implication is true but just because, by means of the shared meaning we have in common for my words, they can match with their own inner experience. It is, in other word, not a 'discovery' but an axiom, a definition, a convention that me and some readers might accept to have a shared interpretation of reality. It is easily acceptable because we are used to attribute awareness and will to our fellow human being or pet, without further inquiry; actively from analogy (it looks and acts like me, so it must be like me), passively from education (golden rule). No problems nor states. In other words, awareness and will are qualia and they are lifted to being objective by the shaky grounds of analogy and/or convention or...who knows what.

The shortcoming becomes apparent when we study the dung beetle: the beetle forms a dung ball and carries to its nest. If you remove the dung ball while the beetle is rolling it to the nest, the beetle will anyway go all the way to the nest, unable to stop the algorithm that we expressed to describe the beetle's behaviour. This is not intelligent because it cannot discriminate when we do: the beetle lacks in awareness compared to us studying it. If we test the sight and nothing else of a blind from birth human then we could conclude that it is a non-intelligent being. We don't because we will be more keen to find other grounds to assess the being's awareness, since we already granted it by analogy and/or convention. And for awareness it is certainly the presence of a nervous system that motivates further attempts of defining problems to measure this being's intelligence (or of the beetle). Can something without a nervous system be intelligent, or aware? I don't know, but it is a more objective ground for lifting awareness from a more subjective judgement, given that we agree on

• what is a nervous system
• the ways to experiment/operate it

As you can see, this agreement still comes from verbal agreement between human beings, but the "leap of faith" seems shorter (i.e. more people would share this interpretation of reality). Well, more famous and clever people than me wrote about this, I hope you get the idea. This does not anyway tell which are the problems that a being solves, nor which are not being solved by deliberate choice... When lifting 👁 ䷀ ⇒ 💡 from subjective experience to an objective definition, without a form of abstract communication (e.g. verbal) with the individual being tested (as would happen by talking to the aforementioned blind human), this meta-problem is insourmontable. We might look for physical clues, such as appearance or electric signals in the body of the being under investigation, but this might be a limiting assumption because we might be missing the right problems with which test the awareness of a being. Could you tell that human beings fall in love, have suicidal thoughts or enjoy playing games by looking at just their physical and electrical activity, and nothing else? Yet subjectively it is even easy to conjure an explanation for which such behaviours are solutions to problems.

What generates such problems? Will? If will is what prompts to solve such problems, is formulating such problems a cause or an effect of having a will? A solution to another problem itself? Who comes first, intelligence or will? Can we therefore revert the implication? I don't know.

Back to the implication. Its meaning becomes in practice: if I can convince myself that this thing is aware and has will, then I can be more confident that it is intelligent. To mark explicitly this different meaning, I will write it as

👁 ䷀ ⤜ 💡

It becomes therefore a tool for investigation.

In the following I will test 👁 ䷀ ⤜ 💡 with some examples. My goal is to show that, at least in such examples, we reason in a way that is more or less captured by such inquisitive implication.
Human beings created since long ago machines that automatically solve problems. The flush mechanism of a flush toilet allows you to get rid of fæces by discharging the water contained in the water tank; and the float in the tank solves the problem of guaranteeing that you can flush again shortly. This system solves at least one problem. Is the float intelligent? No, because it has no choice ⚄, hence it is not aware.

The program that finds the best route on whatever input like that in Google Maps has choice. We can even attribute it awareness 👁. But given that we know it is a program, this is not a choice coming from free will; that is, it is somebody else that decided how Google Maps should behave.

People practising cargo cults exhibit awareness 👁 but their knowledge of the world is fallacious. But we would still tell that they are intelligent, because we would see their behaviour as moved by will.

If extraterrestrials would visit us and had no biological features, would we attribute will or awareness to them? or rather would we look for evidences for them being tools of some other willed, intelligent being? Would we behave the same if they were talking cats instead, or would we, in this latter case, rather assume first that they are aware and willed?

There are even cases in practice where we can, even for just a moment, grant will and awareness, therefore intelligence, to a being whose behaviour is highly unpredictable or catches us unprepared while focused on something else. For instance you might get angry at your computer or car when it is not working properly and you would react in a violent way as if the malfunction was made voluntarily and with bad intentions.

Weather is highly unpredictable; and in fact some environmentalists anthrophomorphize nature by granting will to it. Is nature (i.e. the world minus mankind) intelligent? Who can tell? It is likely that it is the high stakes (= risk of annihilation) that make this attribution possible, without further inquiries.

The simplest life forms, microbes (including viruses), are continuously surprising us when they develop antimicrobial resistance; but no doubt we won't grant them will nor intelligence, because we would assume they do not have choice and their countering does not come from their will. As individuals suffering the consequences of being the unfortunate host of such beings, anyway, it is not uncommon in desperation to attribute them a malevolent will. Same applies for other kind of sickness such as cancer.

The case of microbes is a good example to stress how the concept of 'will' probably does not belong to the physical world, but exists in the abstraction created by our being human, and, to a lesser but growing extent, with our fellow mammals. We can see that the microbes want to survive, and thrive, at their host's expenses. We also see them reacting to countermeasures: it really looks like they do have awareness of problems (their survival) and will, but we don't grant them intelligence because we don't know how communicate with them as we do with fellow humans and animals. We know, though, other things about their internal workings which, similarly to the the Google Maps example let us decide that their choices do not come from free will. Note, then, that with fellow humans and animals we conclude that they have will and awareness more for lack of such additional information (or voluntarily closing our eyes upon what is known). So what are such intelligent machines if not very complicated things that deceive us to the point that we give up our suspects?

As I mentioned before, I suspect that when media talk about AI it uses the following definition:

X is intelligent ⇔ X is efficient, flexible and creative in solving problems

I want to show that this definition is not enough to define what we call intelligent.

⇏ : Cargo cult people are intelligent because we assume they have will and they surely exhibit awareness, but they do not solve successfully their problem (getting food from the cargo).

⇍ : The point here is subtler and the following reasoning might be wrong. Will an artificial being which is efficient, flexible and creative in serving its solely, own purpose be considered intelligent? Here comes will again as a subjective judgement. If Google Maps, showing creativity, plays a song it wrote instead of telling me how to get to the grocery store, it is likely that I won't congratulate it. This is simply a machine that it is not working, no matter how well its circuits or software mimick our model of brain. It feels like the truth of the above equivalence depends on the purpose this machine has, and whether this purpose comes from its own will or not. If Google Maps was running on an android working at a tourist office, would it change anything? Yes, we could be deceived if we did not know it is an android; we might think we are dealing with a stupid intelligent being as it sings its song; but as soon as we would know that it is an artificial being, then we would know the android's purpose was given by its maker; and the purpose is, primarily, to deceive us. Hence, the android is not intelligent because it has no will. This is why I think intelligent = efficient+flexible+creative does not work.

The "successful" instances of the Turing test which I read about in the last years do not tell that machines are becoming intelligent, but rather that we

1. have the means today to camouflage an artificial tool
2. consider as reasonably real experiences that are, in fact, wildly simplified from those in which we decide whether something is intelligent or not: e.g. using a chat computer program versus talking face to face

to fool someone into thinking that he is interacting with something intelligent and endowed with will for a certain amount of time.

I hope at this point I convinced you that:

• If we use the etymological definition of intelligent alone, then intelligent machines are already among us, because there are machines that can already discriminate;
• that we deem intelligent something if we can believe it has awareness 👁 and (free) will ䷀;
• If we use 👁 ䷀ ⤜ 💡 then
  • we are not saying anything about other causes of intelligence
  • we attribute will to the being under investigation on subjective grounds
• Artificial intelligence that you can buy does not really tell anything about what intelligence is. It is just something that has been built to be efficient, flexible and creative, with 'creative' being, I guess, a more concise salespeople expression for sparing all the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" that the service people would otherwise have to utter during the product's life.

And if not, I hope at least it was pleasant.

Finally: is there risk of mankind being wiped out by AI? Yes, as there is risk of mankind being annihilated by atom bombs, cars, lack of exercise, drugs, wars, fat food, floods, meteors and meteorism.