How do we judge intelligence?
When it comes to human intelligent, we have to agree that there is no single method to judge how intelligent a person is. How we decide someone is intelligent or not totally depends on what we associate intelligence to. We all have different criteria to define someone’s intelligence such as by IQ, test scores or academic achievements. This fact tells me that it is totally depends on each person’s perception to judge someone’s intelligence due to the fact that human has their own uniqueness.
In contrast, how do we judge machine is intelligent or not? Aren’t they just smart-ouput of human beings?
We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Even this is a difficult decision. Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
As Alan Turing, who is a highly influential mathematician stated below, human started to compete computers in very abstract activity to judge which one is more intelligent, but have been lost from machines lately. In march, 2016, Go grandmaster Sedol Lee was defeated by AlphaGo, the Artificial Intelligent(AI) from Google. Every media announced that technology has won over humanity. “AlphaGo actually does have an intuition,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told New Scientist hours after AlphaGo’s third victory. “It makes beautiful moves. It even creates more beautiful moves than most of us could think of.”
This match was far more threatening than just entertainment when we realize AI’s ability to make decision. In the history of human evolution, machine can surpass the intuition, creativity and communication, which has previously been considered to be the area of human’s intelligence. However, nowadays, machine are trying to become more smarter, in a way, seeking to think, act and feel like human beings. If AI reaches that level, are we going to become integrated with chips and surpassed by machine? Like Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, can creativity and uniqueness of human be replaced by the robots as well? If so, what would happen to creative industry like design?
The futurist Thomas Frey predicted in Ted that 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030 — 50 percent of all jobs. Uber’s driverless car is only the beginning and Amazon could totally automate its warehouses and delivery systems, in turn, will result massive unemployment rate. We can think design industries are safe because it is more relevant to human’s creativity and sensibility. However, lots of design that work across multiple devices have to follow a certain rule — that can be easily standardized — such as grids and pre-designed user interface like screens of phone and tablets. In this way, beyond the content management system that enable user to create website without coding like wordpress, AI is already invaded web design area.
In this website builder called “The Grid” advertises itself as “AI websites that design themselves.” The CCO at The Grid explains that “a lot of people want to believe that good design is unexplainable magic, but it’s certainly helped along with design principles like the rule of three, Fibonacci’s spiral, the golden ratio, sacred geometry, and others. Whether those crafting designs are intentionally using those principles or it’s just a gut instinct.”
I agree with exploiting AI as a tool to automate repetitive parts of design, which benefit both designer and companies. In a world that is more progressive than at any point in history, I will be open to radical development of technology and embrace the advantages of streamlined process as a designer. Still, I believe there are designer’s role that can not be replace or automate by machine. When it comes to a touchpoint that user and new technology intersect, it is still designer’s role to address the best experience to each user. Like therapist or clergy —the jobs that robots are least likely to take over, designers should not only empathize user’s needs and desire but also understand it to design an optimal solution/exprience for user. Through AI, the process of gathering user’s data could be simplify in grand scale. However, at the end, it is still designer’s insight to plan and decide how to use that data worthily.
Nowadays, one of the important tipping point of AI is to describe a famous portrait, Vertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. We percieve it as human at first glance, however machine distinguish only as combination of fruits and vegetables. Ironically, Alan Turing states in Computing Machinery And Intelligence that “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.” When AI become real intelligent to mimic inherently nature, should designers be afraid of it? I don’t think so. I would keep myself on the cutting edge of software and become a mentor for machine who provides guidance and experience of design.
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