Page 43 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

AI developers have had several successes in this area – just think
of the popularity of digital assistants such as
we have acquired this crucial skill, with their arguments often falling on one side or the other of a nature versus nurture dispute. In Verbal Behaviour (1957), behaviourist BF Skinner famously suggested that language is a learned skill, acquired through a process of operant conditioning. He maintained that children learn language by being exposed to it, imitating it, and then receiving positive reinforcement when they use it correctly. For example, a child learns that if he says “up” when he wants to be
A TRUE TEST OF INTELLIGENCE
2.4 A TRUE TEST OF INTELLIGENCE
Akey area of interest in AI development is natural language processing (NLP), which aims to programme computers to communicate with humans through natural language recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation. AI developers have had several successes in this area – just think of the popularity of digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa, for example – but they have also faced many challenges. And this is unsurprising, for although we use it every day, language remains a highly mysterious feature of human intelligence.
Language has long been a key focus in the debate about human intelligence, because it is only through language that we are able to communicate our thoughts and advance our knowledge collectively. For years, ling- uists have engaged in heated debates about how it is that
Siri and Alexa, for example...
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