alt Hacker NewsWhat I mean is that throwing up your hands and saying 'I know it when I see it' is entirely pointless. There's a reason scientific papers have an (often long) section for definitions.
What I mean is that throwing up your hands and saying 'I know it when I see it' is entirely pointless. There's a reason scientific papers have an (often long) section for definitions.
It's not pointless.
It's acknowledging that this is a place where rigid, universal definitions, that include everything that is X and exclude everything that is not X, are not possible. That human judgement is necessary to determine what is or isn't X.
This doesn't mean that we have no guidelines whatsoever for how to recognize X. We can list qualities that a robot either must have, or should probably have, and anything that definitely doesn't have them probably isn't a robot, and anything that has enough of them probably is a robot.