Aboutness

The Atlantic has an interesting interview with Gary Kasparov on the achievement of IBMs Watson as a player of Jeopardy.  Kasparov's point is simply that, as with his defeat by IBMs Deep Blue, the intelligence applied to this specific goal proves strangely empty and unsatisfying.  Watson may have a very rich semantic network at its heart and be able to query that in some very powerful ways, but once again most of the problem of intelligence seems to lie in other dimensions.

The problem may be one of chauvinism - that our kind of intelligence is preferred the that of the Google, or the Deep Blue or the Watson. But although they have shown an ability to maintain their existence in the middle of a furiously busy circle of genii, somehow this seems less grounded, less real, than the intelligence even we normal folk exercise in the lives we live.

My question is what should an AI be intelligent at? What intentional content is satisfying to our appetite for fellow intelligence? The Turing Test stipulates success at deceptive conversation - the original calls for a man to pretend to be a woman (or vice versa) while a computer program pretends to be a man or woman, and both try to fool a third person.  But most of the candidates at the annual challenge are chatbots, more like an attempt to show that the intelligence of the human judge is easily gamed.  This does not seem like intelligence to me.

As a Heideggerian, the essential thing seems to be a being-in-the-world that has sufficient granularity to accept and respond to, influence and alter its own image of itself.  This may be what Kierkegaard called R3 - that a person is a relation, relating itself to itself.  The resolution of the paradox here is (I think) found in time. The past self is the Real, the future self is only in the imagination, and the present self is a bridge between the two, built, as bridges are, of spare and rigid structure.

Does Watson, or Google pass or fail such a test?