Why AI Works

Interest in Artificial Intelligence is exploding, and for good reasons. Computers in cars, phone apps, and on the web can do amazing things that we simply could not do before 2012. What’s going on? post

This is an attempt to explain the current state of AI to a general audience without using mathematics, computer science, or neuroscience; discussions at these levels would focus on how AI works. Here Monica Anderson will discuss this at the level of Epistemology and will try to explain why it works.

“Epistemology” sounds scary, but it really isn’t. It’s mostly scary because it is unknown; it is not taught in schools anymore. Which is a problem, because we now desperately need this branch of Philosophy to guide our AI development. Epistemology discusses things like Reasoning, Understanding, Learning, Novelty, problem solving in the abstract, how to create Models of the world, etc. These are all concepts one would think would be useful when working with artificial intelligences. But most practitioners enter the field of AI without any exposure to Epistemology which makes their work more mysterious and frustrating than it has to be.

> I think of Epistemology as the general base for everything related to knowledge and problem solving;

Science forms a small special case subset domain where we solve well-formed problems of the kind that Science is best at. In Epistemology outside of Science we are free to productively also discuss pre-scientific problem solving strategies, which is what brains are using most of the time. More later.

Intelligence = Understanding + Reasoning

In his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman discusses the idea that human minds use two different and complementary processes, two different modes of thinking, which we call Understanding and Reasoning. The idea has been discussed for decades and has been verified using psychological studies and by neuroscience.

“Subconscious Intuitive Understanding” is the full name of the “Fast Thinking” or “System 1” thinking. It is fast because the brain can perform many parts of this task in parallel. The brain spends a lot of effort on this task.

“Conscious Logical Reasoning” is the full name of “Slow Thinking” or “System 2” thinking. To many people’s surprise, this is very rarely used in practice. Monica Anderson's soundbite for this is “You can make breakfast without Reasoning”. Almost everything we do on a daily basis in our rich mundane reality is done without a need to reason about it. We just repeat whatever worked last time we performed this task; we are experience driven.

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Finally, Understanding is “Model Free” and Reasoning is “Model Based”. This is likely the most important distinction to people who are implementing intelligent systems since it provides a way to keep the implementation on the correct path when the going gets rough. We cannot discuss these issues quite yet, but if you are curious you can watch the videos at vimeo.com which discuss this distinction at length. Think of their appearance in this table as a kind of foreshadowing.

VIMEO 43890931