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An Essay concerning machine understanding

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arxiv 2405.01840 v1 pith:C2TZGTWA submitted 2024-05-03 cs.AI

classification cs.AI
keywords understandingconceptslistenermachineessaymanymightspeaker
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Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are signs for ideas, which we can paraphrase as thoughts and concepts. To understand a word is to know and be able to work with the underlying concepts for which it is an indicator. Understanding between a speaker and a listener occurs when the speaker casts his or her concepts into words and the listener recovers approximately those same concepts. Current models rely on the listener to construct any potential meaning. The diminution of behaviorism as a psychological paradigm and the rise of cognitivism provide examples of many experimental methods that can be used to determine whether and to what extent a machine might understand and to make suggestions about how that understanding might be instantiated.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Some things to know about achieving artificial general intelligence

    q-bio.NC 2025-02 reject novelty 2.0 of 10

    The paper contends that AI cannot reach AGI while humans supply the problem structure, and benchmarks cannot prove generality because correct answers do not reveal the solver's method.

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