Artificial intelligence: A product of human intelligence par excellence

By Prof. Kirthi Tennakone

What is intelligence? A precise, universally accepted definition does not exist. The Oxford Dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to learn, understand and think logically. Psychologists say it is the capacity for rational thinking, understanding the environment and adaptation to changing occurrences. There are hundreds of other definitions and descriptions of intelligence, highlighting different aspects of the complex trait and bearing many other human qualities.

Intelligence facilitates the acquisition of knowledge, providing learning skills and symbiotically enriches creativity and imagination. A famous quote by Albert Einstein says, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

Intelligence leads to wisdom, logical argument and clarity of expression. It benefits the individual and society but differs from craftiness, which only provides a temporary undue advantage to a person or a group. So many other qualities of people owe much to their intelligence and vice versa.

How we acquired intelligence

Plants and animals are the most advanced forms of life on earth. Plants manufacture food and their structural material out of air, water and minerals, harvesting sunlight and stand sessile. Whereas the animals move and nourish themselves on plants. Mobility freed life (animals) to encounter the pros and cons of the environment, necessitating the development of organs to sense external stimuli, such as sound, light, touch, smell and taste. The result was the evolution of the nervous signaling system and the brain to coordinate different sensory responses and derive information. The process took billions of years and culminated in ‘inventing’ the human brain by the method of natural selection.

The brain evolved primarily for adaptation to the environment. Later, neural morphology and cognitive functions expanded dramatically, permitting linguistic communication and mechanical skills. Evolution favoured the selection of brainy against less brainy! Besides the routine tasks of eating and living, the man contemplated.

Incidentally, the feelings coming to the mind of an early human sitting on a hillock and seeing the scenery in front were routine matters such as gathering food and chasing animals living there. When cognitive abilities furthered, a man, in the same mood, admired the beauty of the scenery. The ‘beauty’, a more abstract concept, was beyond recognition by the earliest humans. Similarly, engraving a picture of an animal, on stone, indicates abstract insight. The men, who first did it, were the most ancient Isaac Newtons and Einsteins. Such abstractions, or realization of ideas, other than material things, or events, surfaced 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, when evolutionary pressure selected an advantageous group of humans with new connections between different parts of the brain. Art, literature, mathematics, science and technology – the key areas of learning so influential in transforming society – originated as a result of abstract thinking.

Artificial Intelligence

The human brain shines above everything else as the supreme outcome of billions of years of biological evolution. No one has yet found a priori reason we cannot invent machines as intelligent as ourselves or superior. The unanswerable question is how long it takes to reach this ultimate feat and whether efforts would eventually lead to a super-civilization or apocalypse. Or because of unavoidable interventions, the civilization doesn’t have enough time to reach that level of advancement.

Currently, there is so much hype and promise in developing artificial intelligence (AI) – the design of computer systems and machines emulating human intelligent behaviour to find solutions to problems via analysis and interpretation of data. A vast quantity of knowledge and information, gathered by centuries of human effort, is available in literature and a significant portion inserted into the web. The neural network algorithms developed by AI gather information pertaining to a question, organize them and present an answer exceedingly fast.

If not excessively indulged, intelligent machines tuned to attend specialized tasks favoirably remodel our future, easing and fastening a host of activities and new discoveries. We already have AI-powered gadgets and software packages on the market. Self-driving cars, smart vacuum cleaners, robotic crop harvesters, surgical robots and language translators, virtual assistants and chatbots; items of the first and second category.

The AI system ChatGPT, recently released by the American Research Laboratory, OpenAI, virtually engages in conversation, or writes an essay, on a topic of choice, within minutes. It points to amazing potential and repercussions of AI advancement.

Are we to give up writing essays and instead get them ‘instantly’ from a chatbot? AI-produced essays are informative but not sufficiently original, creative or imaginative. Sometimes extraneous materials enter the text. The crucially important component of a good essay; creativeness and imaginative remarks would not come from present day AI, which harvests material from available knowledge (written, printed and electronically published). As Albert Einstein said in another quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. To meet the challenge of AI, authors should improve the quality of their writing accordingly – be creative and imaginative in your outlook.

The ChatGPT, and other similar versions, on overall, will impact education positively, because they possess a remarkable facility to extract and interpret data in massive files. However, the problem of students using AI-based software to write essays needs to be addressed. Writing essays and solving mathematical problems sharpen the mind irreversibly. Phrasing an essay is both a pleasure as well as pain every student should experience. Good essays cannot be written in minutes or hours; they require revisions and corrections before finishing. Parents and teachers need to tell children the value of writing essays on their own. Educationists should devise alternative methods of assigning and grading essay questions.

Future of AI and the future of a world with AI

AI progresses exponentially, signaling the world to be prepared for its accommodation and withstand flabbergast. A question raising eyebrows would be how AI technology advances in coming years and decades and its impact on society and eventually civilization.

More and more AI apps and gadgets will emerge, facilitating domestic and commercial activities. The existing information caries hidden clues for new discoveries, which AI can quickly unearth for urgent application. Recently, a Canadian team pinpointed how to design a drug to cure a rare form of cancer, after just 30 days of engagement – a project that normally takes several years.

The advocates of AI strive hard to create intelligent machines getting closer and closer to human intelligence. A difficult question has been how to determine whether a machine is as intelligent as a human. The future of AI relies on understanding this problem.

In 1950, the British mathematician and theoretical biologist Alan Turing argued, a machine performs human-like intelligent behaviour, if its answers to questions could not be distinguished from those provided by a human being. The Turing test focuses on competence in language expression, just one aspect of intelligence. Few AI companies claim that their products (chatbots) have passed the Turing test. However, passing the test does not prove a chatbot or any other AI device exhibits human-like intelligence. Humans perform a multitude of intelligent tasks. They think and are self-aware and conscious-three characters of the cognitive function.

Thinking: concentration or focus on a specific subject.

Consciousness: being aware of the environment and happenings in relation to the past, present and future and the readiness for reacting to external and internal (bodily) responses.

Self-awareness: the feeling that you exist as an individual.

The mind is an abstract entity covering all the above qualities – a non-material attribute of the brain.

Several pertinent philosophical questions arise: can an AI app with intelligence, thinking capacity, consciousness and self-awareness exist independently – a mind without a body (an intelligent phantom)? Can such a phantom instruct humans to do experiments and expand knowledge? Or is it necessary to have a physical body to attain human – like intelligence?

Remarkably, Buddhist literature delved deeply into the concept ‘mind – body relationship’, hinting at fundamental problems in AI and psychology.

According to the Anatta – lakkana Sutra, Buddha was of the view that ‘the self’ is an aggregate of mind and body, implicating the inseparability of body and mind. Perhaps because of the influence of Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism makes references to “planes of existence”, where the mind exists without the body (Arupa Brahma Loka). A verse in ‘Lowada Sagarawa’ says there are four planes of existence where mind exists without a body. AI seems to be slowly approaching sophistication to embrace clever speculations originated over 2000 years ago.

If the body remains inseparable from the mind, inventing intelligent machines encompassing all the peculiarities of humans would be more like creating complex artificial life. If such entities learn to reproduce, they may compete humans!

Societal problems originating from AI

Just like previous transformative technologies, the introduction of AI will lead to initial drawbacks. The world needs to be cautious of the adverse outcomes and direct research and development to reap benefits. The speedy processing of data will ease industries and their management. New products and techniques in crucially important sectors health, agriculture, energy and environmental remediation, expected to emerge from the AI effort will escalate the quality of life. However, when automation takes over industry and management and robots do routine work more efficiently, a good percentage of the population will find harder to gain employment. Are they going to idle and live on the charity of the wealth the countries earn from their AI projects? Wouldn’t social and economic disparities widen as a result? Some economists complain, exacerbating inequality is a danger of AI. Therefore, instead of going for excessive automation, the technology should divert attention to deliver beneficial products and processes.

Artificial intelligence, a product of human natural intelligence, will be a bonus if directed by wisdom. Very unlikely that it will ever overtake the supremacy of human creativity and imagination.

A highly valued character of an individual often envied is his or her imaginative and creative aptness – which AI cannot deprive.

(The author can be reached via email: ktenna@yahoo.co.uk)