Deterministic Autonomous Systems

Following Turing (1950), most AI researchers accept a purely behavioral criterion for intelligence. That is, an artificial device that is able to do things that are assumed to require intelligence when done by a human merits the description intelligent even though it is merely a mechanism. Thus, a computer program capable of playing excellent chess would be considered intelligent, even though it succeeds through straightforward, computationally intensive means. The average person is less comfortable with this view. Many would say that a dog or even a worm is intelligent, whereas the chess computer is not, even though a dog, much less a worm, is not capable of anything approaching chess playing. Similarly, the lay person is far more apt to ascribe intelligence and other human The term intelligence in the phrase artificial intelligence suggests that intelligence is the key characteristic to be analyzed and synthesized by the research discipline. However, for many researchers the objective of this discipline is the scientific understanding of all aspects of complex behavior. For some, this objective might be limited to the traditional goals of scientific psychology: understanding humans. For others, it might include other species and artificial systems. In either case, the enterprise is driven by psychological questions because humans are the extreme of the known range of possibility that drives our curiosity. Therefore, we feel that AI is—or ought to be—seeking to understand and build fully humanlike systems, not simply problem-solving machines. This article presumes that the reader is willing to adopt this position for the moment. Articles