Questioning Whether AI Can Have Intent And What This Means For Self-Driving Cars

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

There are various ways in which someone might express their intent or intentions. In some instances, a person expresses their intent directly, while in other cases they appear to be avoiding being pinned down on their intentions and are trying to toss the intent onto the shoulders of someone or something else.

When we express our intent, there is no particular reason to necessarily believe that it is true per se.

A person can tell you their intentions and yet be lying through their teeth.

Or, a person can offer their intentions and genuinely believe that they are forthcoming in their indication, and yet it might be entirely fabricated and concocted as a kind of rationalization after-the-fact.

Consider too that a person might be offering acrid cynical remarks, for which their intention is buried or hidden within their words, and you accordingly need to somehow decipher or tease out the real meaning of their quips.