Defining the Terms

Part of the difficulty in talking about artificial intelligence is the ambiguity of the meaning of intelligence. Over the past few months, I’ve been informally investigating what different people think about what “intelligence” actually is, and have come across quite a range of ideas.

Academically speaking, it seems that the most common interpretation of intelligence is that it is something that is both (a) quantifiable, and (b) strongly correlated with a person’s likelihood of achieving particular types of education and/or employment. In other words, statistics and practical measurements are considered extremely important. Continue reading