Artificial Intelligence: Today
Wendell H. Chun · 2024
The foundations for developing Artificial Intelligence and Robotics begin with the science of cognition with the brain and mind, the engineering of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic systems, and mathematics as the tools to develop these systems. Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Scientists in neuroscience and cognitive psychology (Latin: cognoscere; Greek: gignoskein to know, perceive) are interested in the “problem” of the mind and brain. Engineering is the use of those previously mentioned scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including robots, autonomous vehicles, manipulators, drones, and many other “smart” systems. Engineers are interested in the “solution” rather than the “problem”, the domain of science. Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas, and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. Mathematics is essential in the natural sciences, engineering, computer sciences, and social sciences. For empirical sciences, natural sciences use tools from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, and information about nature into measurements which can be explained as clear statements of the “Laws of Nature”, developed from data and can be further matured through mathematics. The polemical literature in AI usually contains attacks on something called dualism, but what most critics fail to see is that they themselves display dualism in a strong form, for unless one accepts the idea that the mind is completely independent of the brain or of any other physically specific system, one could not possibly hope to create minds just by designing programs. The mind according to strong AI is independent of the brain. It is a computer program, and as such, has no essential connection to any specific hardware. An important point is that simulation is not the same as duplication and that facts hold as much importance for thinking about arithmetic as it does for feeling angst ( Figure 6.1 ).