Where is My Mind?

Abstract

The research field of AI is concerned with devising theories, methods, and workflows for producing software artifacts which behave as intelligent subjects. Evidently, intelligence, as the property of an agent, is not of necessity inherited from the methods used to construct it: that a car has been assembled by robots does not make it a robot. Unfortunately, even this obvious distinction can sometimes be erased in some prominent published work. To wit: the statement, “an agent that performs sufficiently well on a sufficiently wide range of tasks is classified as intelligent” was recently published by DeepMind [273] to give context to a paper claiming to have developed “the first deep RL agent that outperforms the standard human benchmark on all 57 Atari games” [14]. This invites the inference that the range of the tasks (57 games) that have been achieved warrants calling the advertised agent ‘intelligent’. However, careful reading of the paper reveals that the authors have in fact developed 57 different agents. Granted, this was achieved using the same development method and system architecture, but 57 agents were nonetheless trained, rather than the claimed single agent. Here is a prime example of distilled confusion: a property (applicability to 57 tasks) of one construction method (instantiating the Agent57 system architecture) has just been ‘magically’ transferred to some 57 artifacts produced by the method.