Opponent players in games have been labeled AI for decades, so yeah, software engineers have been producing AI for a while. If a computer can play a game of chess against you, it has intelligence, a very narrowly scoped intelligence, which is artificial, but intelligence nonetheless.
I would put it differently. Sometimes words have two meanings, for example a layman’s understanding of it and a specialist’s understanding of the same word, which might mean something adjacent, but still different. For instance, the word “theory” in everyday language often means a guess or speculation, while in science, a “theory” is a well-substantiated explanation based on evidence.
Similarly, when a cognitive scientist talks about “intelligence”, they might be referring to something quite different from what a layperson understands by the term.
In a way, yes, if you frame it right. To simplify, you’re basically asking “is a calculator intelligent?”, right? While it’s an inanimate object, you could say that, in a way, it acquires knowledge from the buttons user presses and it applies knowledge to provide an output.
“But that’s not making decisions, it’s just circuits!”, you might say. To which I might reply “Who’s to say that you’re making decisions? For all we know, human brains might also just be very complicated circuits with no agency at all, just like the calculator!”.
IIRC, in his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil even assigns certain amount of intelligence to inanimate objects, such as rocks. A very low amount of course, and it might be a stretch, but still.
So yeah, it’s really hard to draw a line for intelligence, which is why there’s no firm definition and no consensus.
Of course there are various versions of NPCs, some stand and do nothing, others are more complex, they often “adapt” to certain conditions. For example, if an NPC is following the player it might “decide” to switch to running if the distance to the player reaches a certain threshold, decide how to navigate around other dynamic/moving NPCs, etc. In this example, the NPC “acquires” knowledge by polling the distance to the player and applies that “knowledge” by using its internal model to make a decision to walk or run.
The term “acquiring knowledge” is pretty much as subjective as “intelligence”. In the case of an ant, for example, it can’t really learn anything, at best it has a tiny short-term memory in which it keeps certain most recent decisions, but it surely gets things done, like building colonies.
For both cases, it’s just a line in the sand.
To say it’s not intelligence is incorrect. It’s still (an inferior kind of) intelligence, humans just put certain expectations into the word. An ant has intelligence. An NPC in a game has intelligence. They are just very basic kinds of intelligence, very simple decision making patterns.
You can’t patent code, and it’s automatically copyright protected. Nintendo just needs to prove they wrote the code originally, which should be easy.
I selected all and it’s still not enough of a reason!
Bow to Alec! Let Alec consume you!
How dare you ignore Alec’s video? 😤
But they didn’t watch kittens suffer. Yuge difference.
Tekken, Lili vs. Panda.
Having an ergonomic keyboard is a step in the right direction, but it’s still a device for entering text.
Can’t be, you don’t see him showing off with a Single Action Army revolver.
As you mentioned, it’s still a slab, that is only good for a few genres of games. Basically, a flat controller without the analog sticks, which is opposite of ergonomic, and you don’t use that with a mouse.
You’re misinterpreting my point. We can make a device with precise inputs that isn’t a flat slab of buttons, we just haven’t yet. This is not a gamepad vs. KBM argument.
It’s not really that ironic. Something more ergonomic with the same tactile short travel buttons would’ve worked even better, you can just also do it with a keyboard, albeit not as comfortably.
In the very least, something more rounded and ergonomic than a row of buttons, something that lays out the buttons in such a way that they are more easily reachable without moving or contorting your hand. Fewer buttons for the pinky, more buttons for the thumb, which is now pretty much only used to hit spacebar. Maybe a big analog stick that sits under your palm, so you can tilt your entire hand to move (IDK how how useful that would be, but you wanted me to imagine something), leaving your fingers free to perform other actions.
I didn’t set a goal to pitch something better, I just pointed the fact that we use unoptimized hardware and hopefully somebody is working on something better.
Yeah, I’m not strictly comparing KBM vs. gamepad. As you mentioned, keyboards are just not ergonomic, and that’s what I was basically saying. So you understood my point precisely, I, too, want to see more options.
I think it stuck around because the primary purpose of a computer is still information handling, and thus almost all of them require a keyboard. And since keyboard is always included and is “good enough” people just kept using what was available. History is littered with cases where something stuck merely because it was good enough and easily available. The QWERTY layout itself is a good example. There are layouts that are much better, yet 99% of the keyboards still use it. Because alt layout keyboards are scarce and using them requires relearning. All while QWERTY is good enough.
I’m not redefining anything, I’m just pointing out that intelligence is not as narrow as most people assume, it’s a broad term that encompasses various gradations. It doesn’t need to be complex or human-like to qualify as intelligence.
A single if statement arguably isn’t intelligence, sure, but how many if statements is? Because at some point you can write a complex enough sequence of if statements that will exhibit intelligence. As I was saying in my other comments, where do we draw this line in the sand? If we use the definition from the link, which is:
Then 99% of animal species would not qualify as intelligent.
You may rightfully argue that term AI is too broad and that we could narrow it down to mean specifically “human-like” AI, but the truth is, that at this point, in computer science AI already refers to a wide range of systems, from basic decision-making algorithms to complex models like GPTs or neural networks.
My whole point is less about redefining intelligence and more about recognizing its spectrum, both in nature and in machines. But I don’t expect for everybody to agree, even the expert in the fields don’t.