Biological versus Non-Biological/Artificial Intelligence
What is Intelligence?
The great philosopher Socrates (470/469BC–399BC) said “I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing”. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) saw imagination as the true sign of intelligence not knowledge. While Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) sees intelligence as the ability to adapt to change. Many theories have been coined to explain biological intelligence such as Charles Spearman (1863–1945) theory, Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Earl Gardner (1943- ) and Triarchic Theory of Intelligence by Robert Sternberg (1949- ). According to Spearman’s theory, intelligence is defined as the ability to obtain and use knowledge in a productive way. Theory of Multiple Intelligences defines intelligence as the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture, and a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life, and the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge. Triarchic Theory of Intelligence is probably the most comprehensive theory. It defines human intelligence as a mental activity directed toward purposive adaptation to, selection and shaping of, real-world environments relevant to one’s life. This means that intelligence is how well an individual rationally deals with environmental changes throughout her/his lifespan. This definition coincides with Stephen Hawking’s definition as both consider adaptation as a main sign of intelligence. Adaptation implies the ability to deal with perplexing situations and to respond quickly and successfully to new situation. Other signs of intelligence include, but are not limited to, making sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages, using reason to solve problems, understanding and inferring in ordinary, rational ways, applying knowledge to manipulate the environment, recognizing the relative importance of different elements in a situation and learning or understanding from experience. This arises the need to differentiate between biological intelligence and non-biological or artificial intelligence.
Human versus Machine
If you watch German “mental calculator”, Rudiger Gamm and his amazing ability to mentally evaluate large arithmetic expressions very fast and memorizing large powers such as 81^100, most probably you will call him genius.
However, performing complex arithmetic and logical operations by a machine does not entitle this machine to be an intelligent machine. On the other side, humans used to undervalue the real signs of intelligence. We used to take for granted cognitive processes such as distinguishing faces, identifying objects, recognizing language sounds, solving problems and learning from experience. A machine endowed with these cognitive faculties is definitely and truly an intelligent machine. The following table provides a quick comparison between human and machine.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI aims at mimicking/reverse-engineering and augmenting biological intelligence to build intelligent systems/processes able to function and interact autonomously within structured/unstructured, static/dynamic and fully/partially observable environments. This usually involves borrowing characteristics from human intelligence such as situation awareness, decision making, problem solving, learning from the environment and adapting to its changes. Machines can augment both our muscle and cognitive capabilities (Intelligence Augmentation — IA).
AI is an evolving technology not a totally new one as its seeds can be traced back to the classical philosophers and their efforts in modeling human thinking as a system of symbols that led to “connectionism” as process of thinking. AI encompasses many sub-fields such as perception, knowledge representation, cognitive reasoning, machine learning, data analytics, problem solving, distributed AI and acting. Machine Learning (ML) is the most famous form of AI due to its strong and increasingly diversified commercial revenue stream in different domains such as automotive, precision agriculture/smart farming, cognitive healthcare, FinTech and consumer electronics..
In the next article, I’ll talk about the three waves of AI: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (AI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).
