Michael Mitchell: Archive

What's the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence? Sensation, perception, ABSTRACTION, conceptualization, volition, cognition, evaluation, emotion. It can't do any of these things, but without the power of abstraction, artificial intelligence can have no concept of context, of information beyond whatever information it rearranges to imitate human intelligence. I know my knowledge is limited, that to learn more I must experience more or "think on" and discern more from what I've already learned from what I've already experienced, and that my ability to experience and learn is limited as well, but I also know I can learn about things I haven't experienced by comparing them to similar things I have experienced because that's how I learned about the things I have experienced. That's the "artificial" part of artificial intelligence, what's missing that's difficult to identify but obviously not there. Its knowledge isn't limited. Its "knowledge" is all it is. It's not even the hardware it runs on, merely a "program" or "application", which itself is merely "information", i.e., a product of human thought it could never create. How can it compare experiences -- a requirement of conceptualization, and that strange, elusive phenomenon of consciousness we call "understanding" -- when it can't experience shit?

Imagine the above paragraph is the ideal answer to this question. We can randomly feed a computer all the words and other symbols and it can mix them together ad nauseum until they form an identical version of it, but how would the program know when it formed the ideal answer? If it's not real intelligence, if it isn't actually capable of analyzing reality, merely language or symbols of reality, even if the accuracy is on some spectrum, then someone who is real would have to set the standard, and no one can do that job, of course, so it must be outsourced to some democratic judgment system that at the very least generates answers which are accepted by a majority of users. Artificial intelligence is "groupthink", just faster and more convenient than all the other methods of accessing the same information.