A cat knows how to walk, run, jump (and land on her feet), hear, see, watch, learn, play, hide, be happy, be sad, be afraid, dream, hunt, eat, fight, flee, reproduce, educate her kittens, and the list is still very long.
CATESBY HOLMES: ‘If you share your home with a dog or a cat, look at it carefully and you will get a good overview of everything we don’t know how to do in artificial intelligence. “But my cat does nothing all day except sleep, eat and wash herself,” you may think. And yet your cat knows how to walk, run, jump (and land on her feet), hear, see, watch, learn, play, hide, be happy, be sad, be afraid, dream, hunt, eat, fight, flee, reproduce, educate her kittens – and the list is still very long.
Each of these actions requires processes that are not directly “intelligence” in the most common sense but are related to cognition and animal intelligence. All animals have their own cognition, from the spider that weaves its web to the guide dogs that help people find their way. Some can even communicate with us. Not by speech, of course, but cats and dogs don’t hesitate to use body language and vocalisation – meowing, barking, wagging their tails – to get what they want…
Among all these cognitive skills, there are only a handful that we are beginning to know how to reproduce artificially. For example, bipedal locomotion – walking with two legs… What about object recognition? Today we know how to create computer algorithms that can do that, don’t we? While it is true that some can now name the content of almost any image, this does not relate to intelligence or cognition…
When an algorithm “recognises” an object, it doesn’t understand at all – really, not at all – the nature of that object. It only proceeds by cross-checking with examples previously presented. This explains why there have been a number of autonomous-car crashes. While roadways are a highly constrained form of the world, they remain visually and functionally complex – vulnerable users such as pedestrians and cyclists can too easily be overlooked, or one street element mistaken for another. And the consequences of AI’s shortcomings have sometimes been fatal’. SOURCE…
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