what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?

Question

what does it mean for a machine to “learn?” How do we quantify something like skill growth when, for humans, learning is a subjective experience?

In: 4

Answer 1

Learning is not a subjective experience.

When a person learns to spell, there are ways to test whether or not they have learned. For example, maybe a test will be a list of words, some of which are spelled correctly, and some of which are not. The learner must identify which is which; some answers will be correct, others not. In this way, we quantify how much the person has learned.

The same is true of AI. We can teach an AI system to identify a school bus, and then test it by showing it pictures that may or may not have a bus and counting how many times it is correct.