On Artificial Intelligence

And why we need to study Human Competence

The first attempts at Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the mid 20th century, attempted to mimic the human brain. Early Computer Scientists were fascinated at how simple artificial neural networks, which had a general resemblance to the neurones and synaptic connections of the brain, could solve simple problems. Many hailed a new age, and a new type of computer which could end-up solving all problems humans could solve, and attain and surpass human intelligence.

This euphoria was short-lived and died down. Firstly, due to hardware constraints, early AI systems could not scale beyond toy problems. Secondly, there was more and more debate and controversy on how exactly human intelligence worked, and how humans solve problems. Humans had little consensus on what “Human Intelligence” meant, let alone the “Artificial” variety. Finally, there were systems which bore no resemblance to the brain what-so-ever but could still solve interesting and “intelligent” problems.

Hence, the focus moved away from “how” machines solved problems to “what” problems machines solved. Computer Scientists have focussed on getting machines to solve intelligent problems while leaving the definition and study of intelligence to philosophers and psychologists.

However, “intelligence” was still poorly defined. What made a problem an intelligent problem?

Computer Scientists adopted the somewhat problematic definition of defining an “Intelligent Problem” as problems that “humans can solve better than machines”. Playing complex games like Chess, or recognizing hand-writing, or writing “creatively”, were all considered examples of “intelligent problems”, because at the time, humans could solve them better than machines.

This definition was problematic because the moment a machine could solve an intelligent problem better than a human, the problem ceased to be an “intelligent problem” (by definition). Hence, as computers got better an better at playing Chess, eventually beating…

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