The ROLE of Human Intelligence in this Age of AI
The ROLE of Human Intelligence in this Age of AI
First I want to define what is Intelligence. Intelligence is first a way to identify a pattern and then making a choice of an action path that's in service for a goal. For example a fridge "choosing" to switch on its light when you open the door.
There are ofcourse levels of intelligence. A thinking machine (TM) is more or less intelligent based on the number of abstractions that it can come up with. Basically it comes up with a decision tree based on possible variables at play. Corollary: Intelligence can be infinite in two dimensions
What is the level of depth that the TM can reach and evaluate.
How many branches can the TM come up with based on a decision state.
But having and implementing intelligence is a costly activity. So with the help of maths, science and technology, we humans have traditionally tried to create systems that simulate intelligence in some manner. For example, a car crash should trigger the opening of the air bags. This is achieved with an implementation of a complicated system. So during the industrial age we worked on building mechanical systems of intelligence. Then came the information age where we worked on building computational intelligence with the help of software.
But with all the benefits of intelligence, its not foolproof. In fact most of our problems in the world is because of the pitfalls of intelligence. And this branch of study "Philosophy" is, I feel, to explore how to mitigate these challenges. For example, to effectively come up with answers to questions, a TM needs a sense of self and a sense of the ego. Ego means that there will be a sense of self preservation and hence the TM will lie, cheat and deceive. Thus intelligence is fundamentally at odds with the pursuit of truth. Because a TM can only come up with an abstract idea, the Ego has developed "identity" as a way to protect the ideas that it comes up with. Hence Trump fight these wars, and I argue with my wife, to defend the ideas that are there in my head, because my brain is insecure that if my ideas are not accepted, then I don't have any worth.
The simple (not easy) way to escape this conundrum is to question everything. Till now, we have dual roles, coming up with ideas and validating them, both of which are difficult by themselves and compounded by the fact that because we generated ideas, our identity got wrapped around them, thus inhibiting our search for the truth. But now that AI can come up with ideas, we can be free from this role and focus only on the validating part. We had already made some parts of it easier with the help of search engines but we should drill more into this. There will always be a small group of people (artists, top scientists etc) who will be on the fringes and come up with the radical ideas that AI will not be able to come up with. But for the most of us common people, I think it makes sense to truly start questioning everything and hone our critical thinking skills. The good thing is that we are really good at specialising, the more we practice anything the more we become good at it, and this involves Critical Thinking.
Am I just rambling at this point?
Side note: Most of the discussions in this channel is a fight between AP Bhakts and AP Congis and I am disappointed that there is so little talk about what is clearly a defining moment of human civilisation. Why?
PS: AI probably might have made my ramblings more coherent, but I thought probably better to be more real. So forgive me.