Abstract
What do we mean when we talk about the “intelligence” of robots? In what sense does a robot “reason” and “take decisions”? Answering these questions can give food for thought towards understanding whether there is either something so specific in human beings that cannot be reproduced in robots, or—as an alternative—the way to improve robots in emulating human behavior. In the following pages I will try to give my contribution by shedding light on some characteristics concerning human reasoning and rationality, mainly referring to the ancient Greek philosophical tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
The difficulty in translating the term techne with an equivalent English term suggests it is best to leave the Greek word without translation. A rather settled tradition, however, is inclined to translate the term as “art”. Another translation possible and widespread rendering is “technique”.
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- 3.
In the Hippocratic texts, the term kairos is very relevant, from a quantitative point of view (over 250 occurrences of the root kair- in the whole Corpus) and a qualitative one, in the sense that it plays a crucial role in the passages in which it appears. See, among others, De aere, aquis et locis, 2, 12–15, De morbo sacro, 18, 18–20, De locis in homine, 41, 1–6.
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Di Piazza, S. (2019). The Stochastic Intelligence. A Technical Model from Ancient Greece to Robotics. In: Laumond, JP., Danblon, E., Pieters, C. (eds) Wording Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 130. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17974-8_3
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