Your left is my right, and with you definition “get laid” is a task from the point of view of evolution and a goal from the point of view of an organism.
It’s in much the same vein that it doesn’t matter if submarines “swim”, they still move through water under their own power; and it doesn’t matter if your definition of “sound” is the subjective experience or the pressure waves, a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it will still make the air move.
If AI do or don’t have any subjective experience comparable to “consciousness” or “desire” is also useful to know, and in the absence of a dualistic soul it must in principle be as possible for a machine as for a human (“neither has that” is a logically acceptable answer), but I don’t even know if philosophy is advanced enough to suggest an actionable test for that at this point.
(That said, AI research does use the term “goal” for things the researchers want their AI to do. Domain specific use of words isn’t necessarily what outsiders want or expect the words to mean, as e.g. I frequently find when trying to ask physics questions).
These definitions and their distinction are particular and important in AI. The mistaken usage of these terms by machine learning experts does not change their global definition.
> Your left is my right, and with you definition “get laid” is a task from the point of view of evolution and a goal from the point of view of an organism.
Get laid is a task, not a goal. Reproduction is a task, not a goal. The goal is pleasure.
> The mistaken usage of these terms by machine learning experts does not change their global definition.
Ah, I see you’re a linguistic prescriptivist.
I can’t see your definition in any dictionary, which spoils the effect, but it’s common enough to be one.
> The goal is pleasure.
Evolution is the form of intelligence that created biological neural networks, and simulated evolution is sometimes used to set weights on artificial neural nets.
From evolution’s perspective, if you can excuse the anthropomorphisation, reproduction is the goal. Evolution doesn’t care if we are having fun, and once animals (including humans) pass reproductive age, we go wrong in all kinds of different and unpleasant ways.
It’s in much the same vein that it doesn’t matter if submarines “swim”, they still move through water under their own power; and it doesn’t matter if your definition of “sound” is the subjective experience or the pressure waves, a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it will still make the air move.
If AI do or don’t have any subjective experience comparable to “consciousness” or “desire” is also useful to know, and in the absence of a dualistic soul it must in principle be as possible for a machine as for a human (“neither has that” is a logically acceptable answer), but I don’t even know if philosophy is advanced enough to suggest an actionable test for that at this point.
(That said, AI research does use the term “goal” for things the researchers want their AI to do. Domain specific use of words isn’t necessarily what outsiders want or expect the words to mean, as e.g. I frequently find when trying to ask physics questions).