Artificial Intelligence, language and the net - Professor Harry Collins

Talk Description

Software testing, broadly conceived, means working out whether a program can act satisfactorily as a ‘social prosthesis’ – a replacement for a human being in society; this takes us straight to ‘intelligence’.

Hubert Dreyfus famously argued that computers must have bodies to be intelligent. But even if that is true intelligence cannot depend on much of a body because otherwise, all physically challenged people would be stupid. I have argued that what computers need to be intelligent is the ability to share in social life and that sharing in social life can be managed through shared language; the term is ‘interactional expertise’. I have argued that we don’t know how to immerse computers in social life/language. One might argue that Google and the like do embed programs in social life by embedding them in the bath of language found on the internet.

Does this defeat the critique from socialization?

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