You could have a very intellligent agent that acts as though it is completely nuts.
The problem then becomes: you do you know it is intelligent - if giving it intelligence tests no longer works.
However, I think this is a bit of a side-issue.
The problem then becomes: you do you know it is intelligent - if giving it intelligence tests no longer works.
You put it in a variety of environments and see if they tend to look similar after a while. It's easier if you have a goal to test against, but as long as it's optimizing some utility function in a variety of environments, it's intelligent.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.