Why Genuine Human Intelligence Is Key for the Development of AI
Amid stunning developments in artificial intelligence, it’s important for data scientists to rely on their own critical thinking and not just turn everything over to the machines
By Gary Smith
The developments have been fast and furious in recent months. Microsoft announced that it will invest $1 billion in a partnership with research lab OpenAI to create artificial general intelligence (AGI), the holy grail of artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has boasted that “the creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history”
Computers can do many very specific tasks much better than humans, but they do not have anything remotely resembling the wisdom, common sense, and critical thinking that humans use to deal with ill-defined situations, vague rules, and ambiguous, even contradictory, goals. The development of computers that can do everything the human brain does would be astonishing, but Microsoft’s record is not encouraging.
In 2016, Microsoft released Tay (“Thinking About You”), a chatbot that Microsoft promoted as “designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online…
