Weak and Strong Artificial Intelligence

A simple, quick word on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. What is Weak and Strong Artificial Intelligence?

One of the things that was talked about at DEVOXXBE is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is intelligence exhibited by machines. By example the Deep Blue-computer, this is the first machine that defeated the world champion in chess. But when do we speak about artificial intelligence for a machine? For this question there is the Turing test, if the machine is able to let the user think he is talking to a human, than we can say that the machine is intelligent.

There are 2 types of artificial intelligence: weak artificial intelligence and strong artificial intelligence. Weak artificial intelligence is a machine that is focused on one task, a single competence like recognizing characters, a single problem like the game of chess, …

Some weak artificial intelligence around us:

• Smartphone touch screen: everyone touches their smartphone screen different and the smartphone is able to detect it.
• In cars: the ABS system.
• In the kitchen: smart refrigerator, it knows which products are being stored

We talk about strong artificial intelligence when a machine can do any task that a human can do, can do all competences, any problem, has self-awareness or is creative. But at this point it doesn’t exist yet.

Some tests a human-level intelligent machine needs to pass in order to be considered an operational example of artificial intelligence:

• The Turing test (explained above)
• The coffee test: a machine is given the task of going into an average home and figuring out how to make coffee. It has to find the coffee machine, find the coffee, add water, find a mug and brew the coffee by pushing the proper buttons.
• The robot college student test: a machine is given the task of enrolling in a university, taking and passing the same classes that humans would.
• The employment test: a machine is given the task of working an economically important job, and must perform as well or better than the level that humans perform at in the same job.

The conclusion I want to make is that strong artificial intelligence seems cool and handy but is also a bit terrifying. There can be self-replicating machines, which are robots that would be able to produce a copy of themselves. But I think it will take some time to develop strong artificial intelligence.  

/VC