Do machines think, or do they know what they do?

Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) 

René Descartes

Sometimes philosophers say that intelligence is being you. That means if a machine thinks it's intelligent. And when the machine is intelligent, it's itself. That is one of the key questions of robotics. The machine is a thinking creature. That is the thinking loop. So, should machines have rights? When we step on the machine's foot. It can say "ouch". But we can make the same effect with a switch and tape recorder. 

The tape mechanical switch activates the tape recorder there is the recorded word "ouch". And we might not think this system is intelligent. But that is one very simple example of so-called pseudo-intelligence. 

Pseudo-intelligent machines can make quite impressive things. They can ask for key cards and say "Hello Tom" when the person logs into the system. They can involve many complicated reactions. But those things are fixed in the program code. The real intelligence means that the system can learn new things. 

But then we must think ourselves. What happens if we would spend our entire life in some house? We have not seen cars and shops before. And then we just step out of that building and start to walk on the streets. What would the world look like? Will we do something funny if we don't ever visit the shops? What happens if we don't know what a tree is? Robot programmers face that situation all the time. 

We don't automatically know what traffic, cars, trees, and shops mean. We learn those things from an early age. And we might think that those things are self-evident. But they are not. We learn those things from our parents. We have natural phobias. We are afraid of spiders and snakes because those things can be dangerous. 

Sometimes in the past, some of our ancestors noticed that those animals and insects could bite painfully. And that thing is stored in our DNA. Pseudo-intelligent systems can make many things. 

But those systems cannot learn anything new automatically. They need something to teach that thing to them. Or when a programmer teaches computers the programmer programs it. 

Thinking machines are becoming a reality. But before we say that machines think or do not think, we must understand what thinking means. Or we must create a description of what the word "thinking" means. "I think therefore I am,": said French philosopher René Descartes. That means thinking makes a creature exist. And being existing means that creatures can affect us without us asking permission. 

That means we are lords of that creature. We are afraid of machine rebels. And we are afraid that machines take our jobs. But before we blame machines, researchers, and engineers we can ask, would you do those jobs that are transferred to AI-controlled robots? When we talk about thinking robots and artificial intelligence. We talk about things like chess robots, learning computer games, and other stuff, that can transform their knowledge into real-world robots. 

When somebody plays a combat simulator on the net, the simulator can transfer those tactics to the military combat simulators. In that case, players teach the real-world combat robots to handle situations. The research about thinking machines began from chess-robots and it still continues. But when the computer first time won human in chess that was great news. The fact is that the news was about the best chess player on this planet. 

And the AI can win over an average chess player a long time before. So, are we fair? If there is one person on this planet, who can win AI can we say that AI loses to humans? 

Perhaps, we should rather start to think about the complexity of intelligence. And we must stop thinking about the extreme cases. Is the world champion the average person in games? That is one question that we should think about. 

Thinking is the ability to connect information, stored in memory to the information. That the sensors bring to the system. That means thinking is like making puzzles. The machine thinks the same way as the human. Databases are the memory of computers. 

It connects collected data to the database. Combine it with the memory. And make new data entirety.

As you see. Theoretically, AI is quite easy to make. 

The only problem is this:  How to route data to the right database? The database involves information on how to react to each situation. While we discuss with computers or large language models (LLM) we have lots of time to think how to make the questions. And we have plenty of time to analyze and look at that data. 

But when some robot operates on streets there is no time to analyze situations. In real life. 

Situations come to the front of the system very fast. The environment can look different than in simulation and that is a problem with robots. 

The process that we call "active denial" can solve this problem. In that case, the system has a filter that eliminates every unnecessary data packet that the system doesn't need. The control system removes things like houses. And other things from the computer that desire reactions. However, the active denial system must recognize the houses. 

Also, it is harder to make descriptions of situations that come from the camera. That describes how the machine must react to some words. If the robot connects observation with the wrong database, that can cause a catastrophe. 

When we make things like robot cars that car faces unpredicted situations. 

Normally orders for unpredicted situations would be. That the car just stops or slows its speed. But, there is one case where the car should not do that. That is a case of robbery. 

But then we must realize one thing. When we meet a machine that is more intelligent than we are, we face one problem. The intelligent machine can hide its intelligence level. That means intelligent machines can lose us in chess. If it is afraid that we will shut down the server that runs the AI. The AI is a tool that can make many things. However, AI requires a physical body to make an effect on the physical world. Without a robot body, the AI cannot move things and clean yards. The robot body is the tool that makes AI capable of making physical things.