I read this as distinguishing between (on the one hand) an externally defined set of parameters and (on the other hand) a locally emergent pattern that may be too complex to be readily understood but which nonetheless produces behavior that conforms to our expectations for the concept. Consider Google's surprising 2012 discovery of cats.
You can teach somebody about the moon by describing it very precisely, or you can teach them about the moon by pointing to the moon and saying 'that thing.' In the latter case, you have specified a concept without defining it.
That's a lot of meaning to be hanging on "defining" and "specifying".
Could entirely be what he meant. I guessed something similar, but I wouldn't want a reader having to guess at the meaning of an abstract.
Abstract: Sophisticated autonomous AI may need to base its behavior on fuzzy concepts that cannot be rigorously defined, such as well-being or rights. Obtaining desired AI behavior requires a way to accurately specify these concepts. We review some evidence suggesting that the human brain generates its concepts using a relatively limited set of rules and mechanisms. This suggests that it might be feasible to build AI systems that use similar criteria and mechanisms for generating their own concepts, and could thus learn similar concepts as humans do. We discuss this possibility, and also consider possible complications arising from the embodied nature of human thought, possible evolutionary vestiges in cognition, the social nature of concepts, and the need to compare conceptual representations between humans and AI systems.
I just got word that this paper was accepted for the AAAI-15 Workshop on AI and Ethics: I've uploaded a preprint here. I'm hoping that this could help seed a possibly valuable new subfield of FAI research. Thanks to Steve Rayhawk for invaluable assistance while I was writing this paper: it probably wouldn't have gotten done without his feedback motivating me to work on this.
Comments welcome.