3 Goals of AI Research

Last Update: 12 January 2005

Note: or material is highlighted

1. AI as advanced CS, or as engineering
- Goal = to extend frontiers of what we know how to program
  - in order to reach ultimate goal of self-programming, natural-language-understanding computers,
  - and to do this by whatever means will do the job,
  - not necessarily in a "cognitive" fashion.
- AI at "cutting edge" (= "periphery"?) of CS
AI as "computational cognition":
- 2. AI as computational psychology
  - Goal = to write programs as theories or models of human cognitive behavior
- 3. AI as computational philosophy
  - Goal = Is cognition computable?
    - If so, what algorithms are necessary or sufficient for cognition?
    - If not, then how much of cognition is computable?

For further discussion, see:

Shapiro, Stuart C. (1992), "Artificial Intelligence", in Stuart C. Shapiro (ed.), Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons): 54-57.
Rapaport, William J. (1998), "How Minds Can Be Computational Systems", Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 10: 403-419.
Rapaport, William J. (2000), "Cognitive Science", in Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly, & David Hemmendinger (eds.), Encyclopedia of Computer Science, 4th edition (New York: Grove's Dictionaries): 227-233.
- PDF version
Rapaport, William J. (2003), "What Did You Mean by That? Misunderstanding, Negotiation, and Syntactic Semantics", Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science 13(3): 397-427.
- PDF