Comparing Intellect, A.I. Verses People.

I am writing this article because it seems to me that most people assume it is impossible for computers to be intelligent and the general consensus seems to be that if it was at all possible, it would have to be off in the distant future. I am not writing anything in-depth here, this is just some concepts I thought I’d throw out for public consideration.

Maybe there is more to machines than we are willing to accept just yet.

Intelligence in the eyes of most people seems to separate humanity from animals and machinery; but what is it exactly? According to dictionary.com, intelligence is defined as “capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.”

This definition covers a lot of things, how can we break this down and apply it to artificial life?

Learning

Starting at the beginning of the definition we must first look at ways in which the human mind learns in order to understand the relevance of machine learning techniques.

Most people learn through a variety of methods, a one-on-one teacher, hands-on activities, visual memory (ex: reading or viewing illustrations.) Some people need to listen to a concept and have it broken down a few different ways in order for it to make sense, often this means multiple teachers.

Now, looking at these things from a mechanical perspective, all of the above mentioned learning techniques used by regular people can be summed up simply enough as “input.”
Most people and animals have 5 senses to work with for gathering this input. Without fancy gadgetry a computer typically only has one input method we can use to interact with it; the text that you can type into it with a keyboard. Obviously by default, humans have quite an advantage in terms of variety in learning but this advantage doesn’t automatically make people smarter or give them more potential.

The next step after receiving input is to analyze it, match it up with other forms of related input that has already been acquired and register a conclusion, or again in mechanical terms “output”.

Output has some interesting functionality to it, we store it in our memory until it is needed or updated, when it is needed, we call the output and pass the information to another person.

Computers have been able to do these things since the start of the digital age but let’s take a look into some of the other aspects of intelligence as it is defined.

Continued....