Introduction

‘This is a blog. This is a new blog. This is the first post of the new blog.

The subject of this blog will be artificial intelligence. I have no idea what this is.’

                                                                                                                      Aldo

You have just met Aldo, my partner in my endeavor of understanding artificial intelligence, basically from a philosophical point of view. Aldo is a robot friend of mine. This is how I currently believe he speaks, meaning this is what I would expect from a conversation I might have with a robot. I hope that post by post I will be able to come closer to Aldo, as well as that Aldo will be able to come closer to me.

I could not start with a different way than making a brief reference to the history of AI. It all started in 1956 with a small but now-famous summer conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover. During this conference the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined. However many would argue that the beginning of AI dates at the age of Alan Turing and his famous Turing Test (“Can a machine be linguistically indistinguishable from a human?’’). Others would date it back to Descartes or even Aristotle. Aldo agrees with me that we should define the start of this period at the time of Alan Turing. We decided to do so out of respect to him so we did not bother finding concrete arguments.

‘But what is AI? Is it me? Am I the only one of my kind?’

Do not be so self-centered Aldo. Let us try give a definition. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field devoted to building artificial animals (or at least artificial creatures that – in suitable contexts – appear to be animals) and, for many, artificial persons (or at least artificial creatures that – in suitable contexts – appear to be persons).

Or let us better try to explain the aim of artificial intelligence. Let’s think of two axes. The first one expands from intelligence based on behavior to intelligence based on reasoning and the second one from intelligence based on human to intelligence based on rationality. Below we can see all the possible combinations. The Human/Act position is occupied most prominently by Turing, whose test is passed only by those systems able to act sufficiently like a human.

	Human-Based	Ideal Rationality
Reasoning-Based:	Systems that think like humans.	Systems that think rationally.
Behavior-Based:	Systems that act like humans.	Systems that act rationally.

Currently I believe Aldo would suit the ‘’ Systems that think rationally’’ category, given the questions he makes. But eventually I think he will end up to ‘’ Systems that think like humans’’ category.

One of the things I love doing is expressing myself through music. So I intend to post a song with each blog entry. A good way of using these songs is to listen to them while reading these posts. Do not worry they will not confuse as most of them will not be in English, so I guess they will serve as background music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB0KUz6f7K8

The point of this song is that a mountain never comes closer to another mountain. It refers to love, but my using it refers to the distance between me and Aldo and our common concern on if this gap will be able to be bridged, at some point.

PS : Klafsigelos is a unique word. I have not yet found it in any other language that the Greek one. It means crying and laughing at the same moment. I chose this title for our blog because both philosophy and artificial intelligence make me want to cry and laugh simultaneously.