Maxim Raginsky
Maxim is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“Can we reduce everything to solving a bunch of tasks? I think this is actually kind of detrimental to almost any aspect of life and culture that today's artificial intelligence companies touch. They reduce it all to this morass of quantification and list of tasks.”
Brain Inspired · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Raginsky and the host are discussing what "intelligence" even means, a word Raginsky calls malleable enough to mean whatever a given researcher is doing. He cites the narrow definition of intelligence as the ability to solve tasks in varied environments, then objects to how far that framing has spread.
Transcript
It's one of these really sort of malleable concepts that means whatever it is that they're doing. In
cognitive sciences, especially, they're all up for grabs, kind of. Yes,
exactly. So, there's a very kind of narrow definition of intelligence. I think due to John McCarthy, it's basically the ability to solve tasks in varied environments, et cetera, et cetera. But can we reduce everything to solving a bunch of tasks? I mean, I think this is actually kind of detrimental to almost any aspect of life and culture that today's artificial intelligence companies touch. They reduce it all to this morass of quantification and list of tasks.
Well, I was thinking more in terms of the Willems approach that we were just talking about and from the control engineering kind of approach, where that leaves us, where it should leave me in my thinking.
Okay, so control is about effective interaction. Does a system interact with its environment effectively? Is it quote unquote? I like the term coherence. It comes from all sorts of domains. I mean, in philosophy, it's an overall property of a system that has, or system of thought, technological system, social system, whatever. It consists of multiple parts. And each of those parts, even though you can explain them in isolation, in order to really explain what it does within the context of that system, you kind of have to, each of them presupposes the other. It's not this indissoluble totality that you kind of see in some of the idealist philosophy, like in Hegel, for example. But it is a concept that allows you to kind of think about a system in terms of its goals and values. For example, the Internet as a system. It's coherent as long as all the users connected to it can accomplish what they want. But from the viewpoint of somebody else, it can become incoherent. For example, if you just see the Internet as a source of social instability or something like that. And yeah, I mean, that results in loss of coherence in various valuable social economic arrangements. So just like intelligence, coherence is also this concept that you can sort of know it when you see it. But I'm very skeptical of criteria and tests for intelligence and definitions for intelligence, and especially the kind of a thing where you say, oh, an AI system can produce certain behaviors that are often indistinguishable from humans. Well, what is it doing? What is it meant to accomplish? How do we interpret it? I mean, a lot of it is sort of in a sense in the eye of the beholder. If the system accomplishes what we want and if it allows us to interact with the world and with us effectively according to some criteria, then that's meaningful. Whether or not we can start adjudicating meaning of intelligence, I'm not sure that that's a question that control engineering is equipped to answer or should be asked to answer.
Well, I'm the host, so I can ask you anything that's. I think I've heard you mention that you don't believe that AGI is a thing or a thing that can be achieved. Am I quote unquote?