AI: Artificial Intelligence Film Review
Description and Critical Discussion:
This is because a robot, if it is to have human level intelligence and ability to learn from its experience, needs a general world view in which to organize facts. It turns out that many philosophical problems take new forms when thought about in terms of how to design a robot. Some approaches to philosophy are helpful and others are not. The program must have built into it a concept of what knowledge is and how it is obtained.
If the program is to reason about what it can and cannot do, its designers will need an attitude to free will. If it is to do meta-level reasoning about what it can do, it needs an attitude of its own to free will.
1. Attitudes to be required: Science and common sense knowledge of the world must both be accepted. There are atoms, and there are chairs. We can learn features of the world at the intermediate size level on which humans operate without having to understand fundamental physics. Causal relations must also be used for a robot to reason about the consequences of its possible actions.
2. Mind has to be understood a feature at a time. There are systems with only a few beliefs and no belief that they have beliefs. Other systems will do extensive introspection. Contrast this with the attitude that unless a system has a whole raft of features it isn't a mind and therefore it can't have beliefs.
3. Beliefs and intentions are objects that can be formally described.
4. Free will and determinism are compatible. The deterministic process that determines what an agent will do involves its evaluation of the consequences of the available choices. These choices are present in its consciousness and can give rise to sentences about them as they are observed.
5. Self-consciousness consists in putting sentences about consciousness in memory.
An attitude toward the free will problem needs to be built into robots in which t...