General Discussion

...hope about AI--much like so many discussions we have probably all had about the nascent technology.

One thing I always like to ask people when having this discussion is: what IS intelligence?

If it is hard to define in humans, how will we ever be able to say that the "artificial" version isn't actually it?

As an American growing up in the south I always thought strawberries tasted one way, and that "artificial" strawberry flavor you got in Pop-Tarts or Jolly Rancher candies was most definitely not it. And then one day I was travelling in the Dordogne region of France--near where the Lascaux Caves were discovered--and I picked up some local strawberries for a picnic in the beautiful countryside of that area. The strawberries were incredible--though smaller in size than the ones I was used to. They also tasted distinctly like the artificial strawberry flavor I was used to back home. I finally understood where it came from.

Taste is just a chemical reaction. It makes sense that it could be emulated once the chemistry is broken down and understood.

Human intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving to name a few.

One common criticism of AI is that it just regurgitates things it can search the Internet for that has been created along the way by humans with actual intelligence. But a lot of the people we encounter throughout our lives that we consider intelligent are actually doing the same thing: regurgitating things they learned along the way from the intellectual work of others.

So what is actual intelligence, and from where does it come?

We can all conjecture, but the truth is: we really do not know. We tend to define it from our own human perspective, but that is really inadequate. Predictably, in our universe of understanding humans are somehow at the top of the intellectual food chain--the apex predator of knowledge and reasoning. That does not mean we are right.

Our brains and our bodies are complex chemistry. Chemistry we do not fully understand--but chemistry nonetheless.

Currently, we are limited to that chemistry from an intellectual standpoint. It has served us well, but we had to invent computers to do a lot of things we just can't do quickly or efficiently enough to make us effective at them. And now we rely on them heavily as an enhancement and even replacement for our own abilities.

Modern aircraft are a great example: for starters, we can't build them anymore without the extensive use of computers in all aspects of the design and manufacturing; and after that we can't fly most of them without the aid of computer-controlled fly-by-wire systems that allow us to control modern aerodynamic airframes that are not inherently stable.

It is really our own hubris that makes us believe future technology will not be superior to our evolved chemistry.

Future computers will work at subatomic levels our current brains will never be able to without a marriage of our chemistry and their chemistry and physics.

But once "artificial" intelligence can emulate the chemistry of our brains, it will be a very short time before it surpasses anything our current actual intelligence can comprehend at the moment.