Strong AI - Origin of The Term: John Searle's Strong AI

Origin of The Term: John Searle's Strong AI

See also: philosophy of artificial intelligence and Chinese room

The term "strong AI" was adopted from the name of a position in the philosophy of artificial intelligence first identified by John Searle as part of his Chinese room argument in 1980. He wanted to distinguish between two different hypotheses about artificial intelligence:

  • An artificial intelligence system can think and have a mind. (The word "mind" has a specific meaning for philosophers, as used in "the mind body problem" or "the philosophy of mind".)
  • An artificial intelligence system can (only) act like it thinks and has a mind.

The first one is called "the strong AI hypothesis" and the second is "the weak AI hypothesis" because the first one makes the stronger statement: it assumes something special has happened to the machine that goes beyond all its abilities that we can test. Searle referred to the "strong AI hypothesis" as "strong AI". This usage, which is fundamentally different than the subject of this article, is common in academic AI research and textbooks.

The term "strong AI" is now used to describe any artificial intelligence system that acts like it has a mind, regardless of whether a philosopher would be able to determine if it actually has a mind or not. As Russell and Norvig write: "Most AI researchers take the weak AI hypothesis for granted, and don't care about the strong AI hypothesis." AI researchers are interested in a related statement:

  • An artificial intelligence system can think (or act like it thinks) as well as or better than people do.

This assertion, which hinges on the breadth and power of machine intelligence, is the subject of this article.

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