The Rise of Intuitive Machines
Objective: to explain artificial intelligence to the lay person.
When we were children, our parents, teachers, and other mentors simplified the world for us. They taught us rules to apply, and encouraged reason and logic to work through real-world problems.
Example: “Don’t talk to strangers.”
Then, we grew up.
We realize that the problems we face are frequently in the gray area. The simplified rules we learnt as children do not apply directly. Right and wrong fall on a continuum. While growing up, we synthesized our experience of this continuum into human intuition.
Example: This intuition empowers us to decide which strangers to talk to. We benefit from being correct, or we learn from our mistakes.
Similarly, the major world religions and many legal frameworks have rules to deal with personal conduct and complex human relationships.
Interestingly, most of the religions teach rules using parables to stand in for experience for children. Similarly, legal frameworks require human interpretation, and therefore, law schools teach case studies to stand in for experience for the legal student.
The synthesis of experience is intuition. Intuition empowers us to assess, recognize, and handle new situations. It is predictive in nature.
Conversely, rules and logic are the result of analysis. Analysis is to study the parts. Definition: ‘a detailed examination of the elements or structure’.
Traditional machines (software and hardware) are designed to use human prescribed rules and logic to make decisions on a pre-established domain of input, and to produce an anticipated range of output. Any unforeseen input results in system fault.
Artificial intelligence includes mathematical machines (aka, software) that discover patterns in human-provided data sets, to make predictions on previously unseen data points. In other words, AI synthesizes experience to handle new situations.
AI represents machines that have grown up. They are rapidly learning about our world and synthesizing numerical patterns as their form of intuition. Unlike the Great Pumpkin, through that deliberate learning, intuitive machines have arisen.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial means ‘made by a person.’
Machines are also making other AI machines these days. That still falls under the definition of ‘made by a person.’ After all, if God made the universe, who made God? Or, if the Big Bang or other physical events created the universe, what created the origin? Those are beleaguered philosophies that we can use to get past the word ‘artificial’ at least.
So then, what is ‘intelligence’? If you are willing to accept that ‘perception is reality’, then, there are 2 descriptions of intelligence.
Human-like
If intelligence is to be ‘like human’, then there is well-established academic evidence that come out of Stanford more than 20 years ago.
The Media Equation is a general communication theory that claims that people tend to treat computers and other media as if they were either real people or real places.
In other words, prior to any recent AI revolution, people have already been treating traditional software as though it were human-like, and therefore, intelligent.
007 : James Bond
One goal of this famous franchise to create a hero who is beyond the usual action hero. We are convinced of his superiority when we are shown fighting scenes where Agent Bond uses ‘stuff lying around’, like a tractor backhoe on a freight train, as a weapon to overcome the bad guy. This is an oft repeated ploy across many movies of this franchise. It appeals to our sense of intelligence in how he handles a new situation, eschewing brute force methods.
I give this popular, fictional example to appeal to how we perceive intelligence. To be able to handle a new situation previously unseen is the mark of our perception of intelligence. Software that learns, can handle new situations through pattern recognition and make predictions.
And our perception IS our reality. If we have been treating machines like real people, and if we perceive them handling new situations, then their intelligence is our reality.