Had a thought.
It was that artificial intelligence was a misnomer because biological intelligence is no more real than non-biological intelligence. I would be wrong.
While my statement would be correct in reference to the concept of intelligence, it was incorrect in reference to the world artificial I grew up understanding artificial to mean fake, not real, or an imitated version of. Turns out it’s a little more nuanced. Artificial simply means created by humans instead of occurring naturally. I’m happy I looked that up.
I had another thought.
At this stage, AI is being largely designed and furthered by humans. That workload is starting to shift. At a certain point, AIs will be able to further their own intelligence and will require no more from humans than humans require from computers today. At this point, if you can no longer say that an AI’s intelligence was created by a human, is it still artificial?
The definition of artificial suggests two things: created by humans and not occurring naturally. Once an AI takes over the development of its own intelligence, is that development not happening naturally? When naturally is defined as without special help or intervention, the answer is yes. But what about when we consider the definition of nature? Well, Google would suggest that nature is the phenomena of the physical world […] as opposed to humans or human creations. While you could make the argument that a self-developing AI was originally created by a human, it would like someone having planted a seed saying that they created a tree. And just like the tree, the next generation of offspring would lack any direct connection to human creation.
So by definition, artificial intelligence becomes non-biological intelligence once it becomes responsible for its own intellectual development. Very interesting.
My Mental Model 