Maybe the reason that scientists are having a hard time creating artificial intelligence, Scott Adams suggests, is because human intelligence is an illusion:
You can’t duplicate something that doesn’t exist in the first place. I’m not saying that as a joke. Most of what we regard as human intelligence is an illusion.
I will hedge my claim a little bit and say human intelligence is mostly an illusion because math skills are real, for example. But a computer can do math. Language skills are real too, but a computer can understand words and sentence structure. In fact, all of the parts of intelligence that are real have probably already been duplicated by computers.
So what parts of intelligence are computers failing to duplicate? Answer: The parts that only LOOK like intelligence to humans but are in fact just illusions.
For example, science knows that we make decisions before the rational parts of our brains activate. So if you make a computer that thinks first and then decides, you haven’t duplicated human intelligence. If you want your computer to think like people it has to start with an irrational set of biases, make decisions based on those irrational biases then rationalize it after the fact in ways that observers think are stupid. But no one would build such a useless computer, or even try.
I laughed about the recent reports of a computer that passed the Turing test by pretending to be a teenager that was such an airhead jerk that he never answered questions directly. That fooled at least some of the observers into thinking a real teen was behind the curtain instead of a computer. In other words, the researchers duplicated human “intelligence” by making the computer a non-responsive idiot. Nailed it!
Obfuscation like this is infuriating:
Yeah, “he” was an airheaded jerk so much so that it fooled the observers.
We all know that that computer was simulating a moody teenage girl. A teenage boy would be way less likely to act that way because he’s been conditioned to expect violence if he does.
The constant intentional inversion of reality is exasperating.
That bit he mentions about making decisions before the relevant brain areas activate is very possibly one of those internet truths to which there is less than meets the eye. I remember seeing that being mentioned back when, and then a followup story on further research that indicated the original results were entirely experimental error. The followup didn’t get reported nearly as widely. Also, neither of the studies was described in any particular detail by most media organizations. The specifics of what exactly they were testing and how they got their results are really hard to come by, so it’s hard to make an accurate judgement as to whether the results are credible or not.
People hear “science!” and just trust it by reflex. They shouldn’t.
I may be thinking of a different paper, but the way it was described back in my cognitive science courses was that you make most decisions instinctively; without input by the deliberative, “rational” portions of your brain. If you access the event in memory, you’ll automatically make up a post-facto rational reason for the instinctual decision. This isn’t usually lying, even you think that’s why you did what you did, at least most of the time.
That may be true but what I saw was something somewhat different — a claim that when people “decide” to do something, like reach out and pick up a piece of cheese, the decision-making areas of the brain activated after the motor areas, meaning that they were rationalizing a process already underway (and the later study claimed to disprove that).
What you describe makes sense on the surface but again I haven’t seen any clear explanation of the specific evidence supporting that claim. Not saying it doesn’t exist, but it looks like the sort of claim that is easy to hand-wave one’s way into.
I’m sure we could get to the bottom of this if we could only harness the unused 90 percent of our brains…