Brain wars?
In recent times, people are in more fear over machines with intelligence. Automation wave, Google’s AlphaGo Zero announcements, newer applications by machine learning (ML) and AI programs have flooded news feed and adding more tension to an ordinary people doing ordinary and extraordinary works.
Some of products of ML and AI have outperformed humans in tasks like image recognition, object detection which have definitely improved the success rate of surgeries, warehouse management and many more. AI scientists want to mimic human intelligence in inanimate machines with tactical techniques like deep learning, reinforcement learning and others.
But can they build electronic brain as efficient as human brain?
There is tremendous development in image recognition and it’s application in autonomous vehicles, face recognition and others. But it is mere crunching of numbers in the form of pixels, with slight changes to these numbers can change the understanding of same image by machine. Adversarial attacks have helped in improving these algorithms by spitting out the limitations. But finding solution to wrongly understand problem is not always right solution or approach.
Scientists have wrongly understood the human brain, some have taken pain to explain the usage percentage of average human brains (which is funny). Humans fail at identifying all the faces (images) like machines do, but it doesn’t mean we are weak at understanding or identifying them. Our brain is energy sucker as compared to other organs in the body, but equally energy efficient by prioritizing tasks at end. And priorities vary with individual, so does his excellency in field of interest. It is easy to come to conclusion that machines achieving better success rate at tasks can outperform and outlive humans. The process and priorities have to be considered to understand capabilities.
In this beautiful article, François Chollet has beautifully explained about intelligence explosion and it’s wrong understanding. Humans have evolved and are evolving with time, right choices and priorities over centuries have changed and created life we lead now. Consider an eagle with sharp eyes identifying a tiny prey from far above grounds, telepathic whales and many other animals with their unique skills. These animals are superior to humans in their respective abilities, it is just they have evolved accordingly with their environments. Our intelligence is not from a single entity but from collective entities of all the cells in our body.
So just considering the brain as part of human intelligence would turn out to be wrong or incomplete approach to building and understanding human intelligence.
Humans are great at evolving and adapting to changes unlike other animals, it is a matter of speed of evolution with fast paced world be consumed by so called intelligent machines. It’s environments and priorities that we make decides intelligence in respective field of choice. It is more important to understand ourselves prior to creating machines mimicking human behavior.
