Historically AI had several winters, where hype bubbles rose and collapsed. It is also full of pronouncements or predictions such as

“We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.”

There has also been an important philosophical confusion that plagued AI in the 1970s. It has been discussed in depth in a great text “When Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity”, as well as here. The confusion was around attempting to represent knowledge in diagrams like these:

STATE-OF-MIND
^
| IS-A
|
HAPPINESS

An even more silly example of “knowledge”

HITLER
^
| IS-A
|
NIXON

From the paper:

Ø the tendency to see in natural language a natural source of problems and solutions. Many researchers tend to talk as if an internal knowledge representation ought to be closely related to the "corresponding" English sentences; and that operations on the structure should resemble human conversation or "word problems".

This is a good example of how a serious philosophical confusion about how much knowledge can be “contained in” a statement drove a large amount of research into systems that later proved unworkable.

What philosophical assumptions is AI research fundamentally mistaken about today?

Right now, the dominance and usefulness of current deep learning neural networks makes it seem that they capture some key pieces of general reasoning and could lead us to a more general intelligence. Sarah Constantin disagrees. David Chapman isn’t sure either.

I wish to highlight several other politico-philosophical problems that are inherent in writing about AI and AI safety. If the AI researchers of the past believed that writing “happiness is-a state of mind” lead to good reasoning, there are likely similar issues that occur today.

The current big problems are:

1. Misunderstanding of “bias”

2. Contradictory treatment of human trustworthiness

3. Deep confusions about the nature of “values”

4. Overemphasized individuality and misunderstanding the nature of status

5. Overreliance on symbolic intelligence, especially in the moral realm

6. Punting the problems elsewhere

1. Human Bias

The idea that humans are “biased” doesn’t sound too controversial. That description usually arises when a person fails to fulfill a model of rationality or ethics th...

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