About Intelligence

Another uninteresting and very personal reflection about intelligence and A.I.

Intelligence, Mmmh.

I remember the time when people used to say that we will have a “thinking machine” when we will be able to realise something (or the code) that will be able to beat a human in the game of Chess. For many many years this would be the true benchmark for an intelligent-capable-machine. The idea behind that was that game of chess and the incredible complexity that opens up move after move, in a chess match, seemed to be something that only a “true thinking brain” (organic), could eventually master. It seemed to be a realm where computation is not anymore sufficient, and other skills needed to kick in. Skills that could only arise in an intelligent system, organic or not. Skills like creativity, intuit, “thinking out of the box”, etc.

Generations of programmers worked on that (not many actually), and time came when the machines got better and better, starting to beat humans. °Oooh, just a glitch, just luck”, was the first reaction, but then it happened again, and the code got refined, and it started happening, again, and again, and again. Then, four years before the end of the millennium, Deep Blue won over Garry Kasparov. I am not going in detail into narrating the path lead to the epic challenge, and the evolution of it (it is a beautiful incredible story though).
I rather prefer (for now) to just move to what happened “after”.
So: the code was able to to win. The question now was: was it intelligence?
What happened to the above statement?
Well as we can imagine, the outcome of it all was something very “human”.
What happened was that the human genre moved the bar. We started saying “Oh, no, Chess was not the right choice, we will rather have a thinking machine when the code will be able to win with a Go grand master”. We were joking, it’s Go, not Chess.
Well, You all can guess what happened next. Yes, it happened.
We refined the algorithms, we developed a new mathematics, and out of that came “Alpha Go”. And Alpha Go won the greatest of all Go players. And You can imagine what the humans did.
We moved the bar, again, without much worries.

I have much more to write, and I will write something, in part II.
I stop in here for now. Before doing that I want to take your hand and take you back to the original question. To think about that, in a different way, in a deeper way. The above facts forces us into a different class of questions, questions like:
What is a true benchmark for “human intelligence” ?
and
Will we (human race) ever be ready for a different kind of intelligence?
Will we ever accept it?
Is it in the human nature to refuse and battle against the mere existence of such thing?

Next One on this will deal with:
Intelligence and Common Sense

PS: and there is more about that. There is the story about how AlphaGo works, how its daughter AlphaZero works. There is the question about the very nature in which they work, and the reflection about the mechanism in which our mind works, and … more.

With Love, humble appreciation for the beauty of Nature
(and passion for Science)

TheCrazyKitty ❤️