Human intelligence in culture:
Understand human intelligence in culture
"AI" can be seen as just the latest tool in the philosopher's toolbox for answering questions about the nature of human intelligence, by the following in the footsteps of mathematical analysis, logic, biology, psychology, fundamental research with cognitive science and others. Some basic obvious questions that philosophy has arrived with are: "We know that we are more 'intelligent' than the other animals, but what does this actually mean?" and "How many of the activities which we call intelligent can be replicated by computation (e.g.-'algorithmically')?"
For example, the ELIZA program discussed below is a classic example from the sixties where a very simple program raised some serious questions about the nature of human intelligence. Amongst other things, ELIZA (primitive natural language processing)helped philosophers and psychologists to question the notion of what it means to 'understand' in natural language (e.g., English) conversation. By stating that "AI" helps us understand the nature of human intelligence in society, we should note that "AI" researchers are increasingly studying multi-tasking systems, which are, roughly speaking, collections of "AI" programs able to communicate and cooperate/compete on small tasks towards the completion of larger tasks. This sense that the social, rather than individual, nature of intelligence is now a issue within range of computational studies in simulation of Artificial Intelligence.
Obviously, humans are not the only life-forms, and the questions of life (contain intelligent life) poses even bigger and tough questions. In fact some Artificial Life ('A'Life) researchers have grand plans for their software.