Today I was playing around with my Mac at work and started diving into the speech recognition stuff. It's pretty neat and quite sophisticated for it's incarnation; a very underrated feature of OS X. The command list is pretty extensive, but what is really impressive is it's ability to 'learn' new commands. Learning new commands boils down to listening to your voice command, interpreting it into text (whatever that may be, it really doesn't matter) and then associating that interpretation with an AppleScript (another grossly underestimated feature in my opinion). Regardless of how good the voice recognition software is, its basically a complex pattern matching program. Like browser gestures that match motion with commands, this just matches sound with commands. This is nothing new. (Unless you're using Vista, then it's just a tease!)

Anyway, I started to think about what artificial intelligence actually is. Granted, I have not taken any class in artificial intelligence, so I may be way off in the technical implementation or definition, but I'm approaching this from a philosophical perspective. I'd dare say, there is not and will never be such thing as 'artificial intelligence'. I think there may be bastardized versions of this, such as this speech recognition stuff, and even more complicated stuff; facial recognition, handwriting analysis, etc. but still, aren't these all just more complicated ways of pattern-matching? And let's assume we can create a computer system that can learn and reason using the learned knowledge - it becomes intelligent. This isn't 'artificial' at all.

I guess the way that we use the words now is misleading. 'Artificial' intelligence is nothing like what I'd consider intelligence.` How in the world do we determine intelligence anyway? It struck me as quite funny to picture a bunch of people hunched around a new robot, trying to discern whether or not it was intelligent - when they don't even know what counts as intelligence or consciousness. Speaking of consciousness, does an intelligent entity need consciousness? I think that it does.

I think that we won't be able to create intelligence until we can figure out a way to bridge the gap between language and thought; not until a machine can quantize in 1s and 0s the joy and sufferring of humans. (Perhaps though, that is a fallacious way of thinking on my part; isn't intelligence the application of the whole as being greater than the sum of it's parts?)

And I can't wait! Imagine being alive when a new form of intelligence and consciousness exists. If the intelligence of such an entity would be anything like what Hollywood tells me (how horrible is that?) we could just load it up with a bunch of data; of history, of art, of government, of science, of sociology, and ask it, 'What do you think about all of this?'