intelligence? (Score 1)

From what I've heard and read, many of the big statements coming from the AI community point out that all this AI stuff works just like the brain; be it some image detection algorithm, a robot or whatever else. I guess that must be the point, otherwise there would be little sense in calling it intelligence, artificial or not.

Another thing I learned in the past is that the people who are actually studying the (human) brain, the 'I' experts so to speak, keep pointing out that the knowledge about how it works is very limited, especially when it comes to more complex (higher) functions.

Now how comes that some (many? most?) 'AI' experts, who may be brilliant when it comes to technical issues, seem to know more about the humans brain functioning than the ones studying it? Their statements seem quite unfounded to me, rather like pure speculation. IMHO, what many AI researchers implicitly do is that instead of actually trying to understand how the brain works, or what intelligence is, they reduce the brain to something simple enough for their minds to grasp: that's not science, that's pure speculation.

Who knows, maybe the brain is just a bunch of neurons, and the intelligence automagically pops up once you successfully connect more than a million of them. It doesn't really matter, the implications are mostly philosophical anyway. But I expect a scientist to be able to distinguish between known facts and speculations. And that seems to be something the AI community is not very good at.

Assuming a sensor and some reflex like behavior, plus a couple of additions and multiplications in an artificial neural network is all it takes to create intelligence. Then where exactly is the difference between that kind of intelligence, and, let's say, an anti-lock breaking system of a car? I don't see a fundamental difference between the software or the hardware used in either of them - Turing certainly wouldn't. So we could go ahead and claim that a car is intelligent, artificially at least. But artificial intelligence is just like the real one (as 'AI' experts claim), and therefore, we humans are all just some mindless robots which, maybe because god forgot, don't come with two wheels attached to either side. Then again, if we're mindless, we should probably stop talking about intelligence as their is no such thing anyway.

On the other hand, if artificial intelligence is not like the real one, what has the whole thing to do with intelligence?