This century will bring the advent of true intelligence in machines. But exactly what does that mean? We often speak of someone as intelligent. We might speak of an intelligent decision or an intelligent statement. But what exactly does it mean for an action, or an utterance, or a person to be intelligent? I have set a goal to come up with some sort of criteria for determining what counts as an intelligent action and to determine if and when the label of “intelligent” is conferred upon a person or a machine. Loosely defined, we think of someone who is intelligent as being capable of doing something correctly. If a person seems to have all the right answers, we might say they are intelligent. If a person can solve math problems well, we think they are intelligent. But these two things are certainly within the grasp of many computers today and have been for some time. So computers certainly are intelligent at least in this simple, perhaps trivial sense. But when heated discussions arise about whether a computer is truly intelligent we are looking for something deeper, more profound. Most of us would still differentiate between the type of intelligence described above and the intelligence that a human possesses. We even have a special term for it: artificial intelligence.

So what exactly do we mean by artificial intelligence as opposed to real or genuine intelligence? To look at the question another way, precisely what criteria must a machine, a computer, satisfy for us to assert that it possesses intelligence that is not artificial – that it possesses genuine intelligence? The term artificial has several definitions, but fall into two categories. The first infers that something is artificial if it was produced to seem as if it were natural. The second infers that something is not real. The first type of definition is a de facto definition which eliminates anything that is not natural. In other words, if it is not part of the animal or plant kingdom it is by definition artificial. While I cannot say that this definition is wrong, it doesn’t seem to be of much use for the purposes of this discussion. We already knew that machines do not occur in nature. They are made by humans. What I want to focus on is the question of what constitutes real or genuine intelligence.

So back to the original question: what is real intelligence? What criteria constitute intelligence on the same level as we humans? I have seen many definitions of intelligence, and I don’t want to limit myself at this time to any one or even limit myself to a specific list of definitions.

At an intuitive level, it seems that intelligence is closely tied to knowledge. The more knowledge one has and the more one is able to make use of that knowledge, the more intelligent one is. My computer may be able to give me the correct solution for an equation, but can it tell me why it is important to know that solution? Can I trust my computer to let me know what equation I should be trying to solve? We are seeing great progress in these types of “artificial intelligence” and as these very smart and very useful machines become more and more a part of our lives, it will become more and more difficult to find differences between what we humans can do and what machines can do. Seen in this light, it is only a matter of time until the term artificial intelligence becomes arcane and machines will be accepted as truly intelligent. Going forward, I will explore how and in what way advances in the intelligence of machines will take place.