AI will one day dethrone human intelligence — An Orwellian myth

Abhay Goghari
Sep 8, 2018 · 5 min read

Image credit www.pexels.com

In a Ted Talk on November 30, 2017, Sebastian Thrun said that as an AI person, he had not noticed any real progress on creativity and out-of-box thinking by AI. The hotbed was really at the repetitive end of the AI spectrum of activities — the processing of legal documents, contract drafting, screening of x-rays, the works. Such tasks were being mastered by AI at an incredible speed. However, they remained single-domain masteries achieved by processing humongous amounts of data extracted from historical snapshots. Thrun went on to say that we must realise that AI is after all technology.

True. AI is technology, not biology. It can progress at an unimaginable speed, and in the not-too-distant future, it may surpass human capabilities in several domains, but can it evolve and mature like a human brain has, over millions of years? AI will make a child’s play out of translating War and Peace in ten languages, but will it even care to know who Tolstoy was? Again, a deep learning-enabled cancer detection app may spot a malignant mole with a superficial body check, without a biopsy. But can that app achieve the full-scale capabilities of an oncologist?

One is technology — metallic and hard-wired, algorithmic, aeons away from originality, creativity, and compassion. The other is biology — organic, intelligent, emotional, and growing from cell to cell, achieving out-of-box proficiencies along the way.

So, will the hard-wired world of algorithms, digitisation, and data-isation take over the mysterious universe of electronic impulses and chemical reactions?

Man vs machine — Human intelligence’s unfair advantages over AI

It is a lost battle for AI, really. The odds are greatly against it.

AI does not possess the 3Es — Experience, Expression, and Emotion

“I don’t think we will ever see a robot telling us a really great joke,” Ken Goldberg remarked in a WEF talk in 2015. And really, we haven’t come across any, since then. Simply because cracking great jokes needs spontaneous wit, and wit needs creativity, and creativity needs originality, and that is where AI proves to be a problem child. It is dumb. It can replicate, but it cannot originate ideas. It can learn, not invent or innovate. And it can observe, not emotianlise. Human intelligence will forever remain ahead of AI on the 3Es — Experience, Expression, and Emotion.

Self-driven cars, a flagship AI initiative, will be a road-reality by 2020. Great! These cars will epitomise safe driving and reduce road accidents and casualty significantly. But will one such car stop if a stranded backpacker waves frantically at it on a remote highway? It won’t. Its environment-sensing capability will only identify an unknown behaviour by a human figure. Probably, its laser sensors will miscue the distress of the facial expressions and the urgency of frantic hand-waving as a potential threat, and press the accelerator!

Sensors and radars and GPRS and odometry apart, a more important differentiator in this hypothesis is that the machine is devoid of empathy to stop and help a distressed fellow-human.

Human intelligence is binary, AI is not

Spearman’s two-factor theory of intelligence consists of the G factor for general intelligence, and the S factor for specific intelligence. In this binary structure, the G factor resides at the core of our system of cognitive abilities, around which the peripheral abilities of the S factor orbit. Each of us has a central cognitive ability, depending on what kind of an intellectual we are — kinesthetic, musical, logical, and so on. However, we all perform scores of other types of intellectual tasks equally well. A person with kinesthetic intelligence also composes a wonderful symphony. Ashton Kutcher is a brilliant biochemical engineer. He now works as a product engineer for Lenovo.

Can we transplant Spearman’s theory in AI? The answer is an emphatic no, and it comes from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Sebastian Thrun points out that successful AI is all about super-specialised, singular functions — “the Google car can never do anything else, it can’t even control a motorcycle.”

That’s the second inherent advantage that human intelligence has over AI. Our brain is the greatest marvel of all times. It juggles and multi-tasks with magical efficiency. In comparison, AI is severely handicapped in being a single-domain expert.

If anyone dares to challenge this, they just have to put a logistics robot in a cancer research laboratory.

AI cannot achieve the human scale of consciousness

For anything to come close to human intelligence, its proportionate consciousness is a prerequisite.

Consciousness is self-awareness. One stands in front of a mirror and knows that it is she or he. From a spiritual and philosophical context, one goes into deep meditation and transcends to an alternate reality, creating a higher level of self-awareness.

Consciousness per se requires the 2-way flow of interactive patterns between the brain and the surrounding ecosystem to create reality. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that the physical world and consciousness are the two sides of the same coin of reality.

At the roots of consciousness lies biology. And AI is technology. It is equivalent to stones and rocks in the sentient context. It is not self-aware. It is devoid of consciousness. It does not know the consequences of its actions. How can such a superficial entity cobbled up in the last sixty years compete with the profoundness of human intelligence achieved over millions of years of evolution?

The only way that AI can even start thinking of beating human intelligence is by evolving the brain-way, through cellular growth, electronic impulses, and chemical reactions.

Possible?

That brings us back to where we began — AI is irreversibly technology-oriented, not biological or cognitive. It is born of algorithms, it feeds and grows on data, out of which patterns are discerned, out of which machine learning and deep learning are derived.

That is why AI cannot dethrone human intelligence.

Data Driven Investor

from confusion to clarity, not insanity

Abhay Goghari

Written by

An experienced writer, copywriter, and published author. Writes for digital and mainline, new technologies, and mobile experiences. Loves to write long copy.

Data Driven Investor

from confusion to clarity, not insanity

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