Why AI doesn’t need to emulate our intelligence
Nowadays, AI shows very intelligent behavior, and it does it in a way that a human don’t. So, AI doesn’t need to emulate our intelligence, but why?
There isn’t consensus about what intelligence is since intelligence is an abstract concept. There are two approaches that I like, and they define intelligence in a very similar way. The first one says that intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals. The second one says that is the ability to solve complex problems.
The currents AI’s show intelligent behavior. For example, the image above was generated by DALL·E 2 in matter of seconds. The process that DALL·E 2 made to accomplish that complex goal is very different from the process that a human would have done. A human would have late hours. But that doesn’t make the human less intelligent. DALL·E 2 is intelligent since has the ability to accomplish complex goals, the goal of generating an image from a description in natural language. A human can also make that, but in a very different way.
AI doesn’t need to emulate our intelligence because different algorithms had been created, that makes AI shows intelligent behavior without doing it in a human way.
In fact, trying to make AI emulate our intelligence would be very difficult since we don’t fully understand how our minds and brains work. And aside from that, it would take a lot of computational power to simulate a human mind. So there are a lot of gaps that waiting for them to fill will only slow down the progress of the AI.
That’s why I think that if we manage to create AGI, we won’t do it by emulating the human mind. We will do it by creating new, novel and robust algorithms. Even if we understand completely how the human mind works, it will be better if we find different ways to create a human-level artificial intelligence because we need to abandon the idea that our intelligence is the pinnacle of intelligence and we must open ourselves to the idea that there will be intelligences different from ours, that in some respects will be better, and in others worse than ours.
New discoveries about the brain, mind, and consciousness will help build new AI as the field of AI has been drawing inspiration from the human brain to create new algorithms. For example, artificial neural networks are inspired by our neural networks, but they don’t work in the same way, and regardless of that, they show intelligent behavior.
The idea that artificial intelligence doesn’t need to emulate human intelligence has been a core idea in the progress of AI and this approach will only continue to create wonderful and strikingly AI.
Thank you for reading me and see you next!
