Philosophical analysis of artificial intelligence evolution

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15421/271902

Abstract

During the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated into all spheres of human life: science, economy, education, politics, medicine, and others. Due to significant progress of this field, it has become the focus of attention of researchers from different disciplines. In humanities there are works that study the nature of cognition, moral responsibility and legal liability of artificial intelligence, however, philosophical analysis of the current state of the field remains understudied.

Artificial intelligence as a discipline began to develop in the middle of the twentieth century and has experienced several periods of crisis called «AI winter». The latter ones were caused by technical limimtations, on the one hand, and by philosophical problems arising in the field, on the other hand. It has been determined that the main philosophical questions of the field are: inability of artificial intelligence to self-reflection and flexible behavior; it is not able to feel, to create; limits of the computational approach; impossibility of complete formalization of knowledge.

The goal of the research is to find out what factors have led to the success within the field during the last decade and whether any philosophical problems from the list have been solved.

It has been found that evolution in the area is based on the technical achievements of recent years, which helped to implement algorithms that previously required many hours of computations. They are increase of the capacity of processors; distributed computing; development of machine learning, and artificial neural networks; cloud technologies. Asa a result the goal of the researchers within artificial intelligence has changed. The leading pragmatic approach in the field has caused fragmentation of research, which, in turn, has led to fragmentation of knowledge presentation. The intention to build the comprehensive description of the world has been replaced by need to create task-oriented over-simplified descriptions of small fragments of reality, while the goal to create artificial intelligence has been replaced by developing applications that simulate human activity.

It has been found that successful imitation of human cognitive activity and incapability to solve philosophical problems of the field have led to the evolution of «weak» intelligence, but not of the field itself. However, each area of the field is open to new practical and theoretical achievements, consequently the study of artificial intelligence will remain the focus of attention in the future.

Published

2019-11-20