AI without programming

Computer science is mostly organized around programming languages. There are imperative languages like C, there are object oriented language like Java and there are modern languages like Python. A common strategy was to implement artificial intelligence in a programming language. The reason is, that a computer which is running a program is the most powerful and often the only tool available in computer science. So the assumption was, that this workflow can be adapted towards artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately, this concept doesn't work in reality. Even many AI related projects were implemented in C++ and lots of industrial robots were programmed in a robot programming language the concept of implementing AI in a programming language is a dead end. Even high level languages like Python doesn't provide the needed elements or libraries needed for making a computer smart. A computer program will run only in a predefined fashion which is the opposite of adaptive systems which are able to solve complex tasks.

The answer to the challenge is to avoid programming languages at all and imagine Artificial intelligence in a non computer science perspective. Instead of asking how to implement AI on a computer the new question is who can humans communicate with robots. This question goes beyond software engineering but it asks for protocols similar to TCP/IP. Implementing a communication protocol in C or in Python is only a detail problem and can be ignored in most AI related projects.

The computer shouldn't be described as a computational machine but as a message transceiver. There are incoming messages from a human and there are outgoing messages back to the human. Artificial intelligence means to formalize this process with a protocol, with a vocabulary and with a grammar. This task can't be described in classical software paradigm but it has to do with protocol design and inventing a domain specific language.

Let me give an example. Suppose the goal is to create a warehouse robot. Such a robot will needed a list of nouns like "obstacle, path, battery, box, barcode" and the robot will need a list of verbs like "stop, forward, rotate, scan, grasp". These nouns and verbs can be combined into sentences and some adjectives may help to communicate in difficult situations. Computer science and especially software engineering is the wrong discipline to describe the robot's vocabulary but it has more in common with linguistics not related to computing anymore.