Artificial Intelligence

[davidMC1982]

Are you not conflating intelligence with an ability to learn (or maybe I've missed your point and that's your entire premise)? I can't help feel that your examples are akin to giving a child a chess board and expecting them to play, without first teaching them the rules (equivalent to programming). I don't think there's any escaping the fact that, once the rules are understood, a computer and a person end up performing the same task (traversing a tree of potential moves for the one with the best outcome). I totally accept that until AI systems can adapt themselves, they're not really intelligent, but I do feel you're over-estimating the power of the human mind. We are obviously capable of adapting but not as readily as it may first seem. For instance, I wonder how many humans (or our ancestors) died before realising that you could kill an animal and take its fur? How many died when motor cars first arrived on the streets? Or in more modern terms, how many people will get run over by electric cars before we (as a group) learn that cars don't necessarily make noise any more. Shared experience and knowledge is almost certainly more valuable than the adaptive power of a single mind.

Finally, I'd like to suggest watching this TED Talk, about complex behaviours arising from very simple rules. What appears to be intelligent actions, cooperation etc, could actually be not much more than natures clever "trick".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y8-IzP01lw

Of course, having said all that, you are totally correct that we're not even at the point where even rudimentary systems can adapt well in constrained problem domains, but I don't see that as a necessarily impossible hurdle to jump.