AI IS NOT INTELLIGENCE
Memory, RAM and computing are not intelligence. As US science fiction
writer Terry Bisson likes to put it “the meat does the thinking”. Bisson
echoes the words of the father of AI, Marvin Minsky who coined the term
and founded the AI Lab at MIT: “The brain happens to be a meat machine”.
Minsky’s original vision for AI was to make it “the science of making machines do things that
would require intelligence if done by men”. This does not mean of course that the machines
have to be intelligent in the way a human is thought to be intelligent: developing flexible
and phenomenal social-cognitive abilities, learning adaptively, making new inferences and
connections with everything and anything, understanding the same thing more than one way,
thinking in different ways through emotion or reason and in different layers, having a view
of the world around us and continuously engaging in cognitive processes that have off-the-
chart energy efficiency. All that with a ridiculously low-sized working memory (aka RAM). Add
humour: does AI think ‘How many robots does it take to change a light bulb’ is funny”? And
consciousness, of course, but that’s another box we may never truly open.
If we compare AI (as bundles of hardware and/or software) with the human brain, AI remains
a failure, at beast a work in progress, despite the slick images from Hollywood and the current
hype in media old and new. Whether AI will ever be able to develop a general human-like
intelligence is still complet ely open. Neuroscientists who look at 100 billion neurons, with up
to 10,000 synapses each and 180,000 kilometres of axonal cabling to link different areas of
the brain with each other (most of the cabling sheathed with myelin to guarantee electrical
conductivity) may have their doubts as to what we can ever achieve with a machine in
comparison with the human brain.
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