What AI Cannot Know
The question of whether artificial intelligence can think is asked frequently and answered badly. It is answered badly because the participants in the debate have not agreed on what they mean by “think,” and in the absence of that agreement, the conversation devolves into competing intuitions rather than competing arguments.
I would like to try something more disciplined. I want to examine what it means to know something – not merely to produce a correct output, but to understand why the output is correct – and then ask whether current AI systems do that, or anything resembling it.