An Ape Called AI

I believe that in about fifty years'  time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of  questioning. 

The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

- Alan Turing

What is Human Intelligence? 

Human intelligence is a conundrum. It is a conundrum because no one knows why some people are naturally “smart” and why some are naturally “slow”.

What smartness is, and how it differs from slowness, even teachers are able to pick out in young children, without knowing why. Common consensus is that a smart person may have been gifted with out-of-the-ordinary intellectual abilities (which begs the question who was the Giver of these gifts?) or they may have applied themselves rigorously to the point of becoming a virtuoso.

It is generally agreed upon then that human cleverness is clearly recognizable by all, and then again, sometimes it is not. Some are smart. Some show their cleverness much later. 

So, this recognizable, intangible trait in a human being that applies itself to problem-solving, to tasks, to human interaction that makes us distinct by some of us having a lot of it and some a little less, is called intelligence. Vague, I know.  

Many have tried to define this thing that is out of the grasp of easy definition with tests and neat words. The IQ tests, for example, are a series of problems that should you be able to solve and score well in them, gives you a seat at Mensa, the oldest high IQ-society in the world. So on and so forth. 

Then there are some who believe intelligence is being street-smart. Many love this notion because it is in stark contrast to the idea of bookish knowledge, or skills honed at the forge of study and something that is easy to be. 

Philosophers, though, take the best view. They believe intelligence is unknowable. And let’s leave the discussion there. 

Here are some quotes that show how notable people have described intelligence over the years. It is a small sample. 

"I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do." — Maya Angelou

"Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon." — Mitch Kapor

“Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.” ― David Ogilvy 

"I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing." — Socrates

"I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine." — Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it." — Huston Smith

"Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world." — Brian Greene

"Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference." — Neil deGrasse Tyson

"I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of His creation. He is not threatened by our scientific adventures." — Francis Collins

Human intelligence then is a happy mixture of natural ability, a well-fed subconscious and unconscious, personal effort, inclination and an ability to learn from experience?

With these basic trellises set up, our vines of thought can now touch on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, its nature, its scope and extent.

What is Artificial Intelligence? 

When you begin to frame an answer to the question: what is artificial intelligence, you’ll need to go as far back as World War 2 (perhaps as far back as Regency Britain, let’s see!) to discover who sparked off the idea that machines could be intelligent beings. 

In the year 1950, a man by the name of Alan Turing, proposed to consider the question “Can machines think?” 

Back then any self-respecting layperson would have immediately answered ‘no’ and remained satisfied beyond a shadow of doubt about their answer. 

Today? 

Not quite so.   

Alan Turing did not actually answer the question “Can machines think?”, he simply mapped it to another problem which is known as The Imitation Game. 

The Imitation Game goes thus: 

• There are 3 people involved. A man. A woman. An interrogator. All three are in separate rooms and communicate via intermediaries. 

• The role of the man is to deceive the interrogator into believing he is the woman.

• The role of the woman is to help the interrogator know without a shadow of doubt that she is the woman. 

• The interrogator through questions alone must guess who is the man and who is the woman. 

As you can see, in the game, one of them (the man) is trying to ape or imitate the other (the woman) to an extent where the neutral observer, the interrogator, cannot distinguish between the man and the woman at all from the answers they give to his questions. 

Now, the issue is, the man in this case must outthink or outsmart the woman. He cannot be a mere spectator. He must be an ace liar and fabricator to fool the interrogator into believing he is the woman. He must play the part of a devious creature by answering cunningly with the intent to deceive. 

Now the woman herself must answer as truthfully as possible and with a touch of pleading to establish her identity. 

The intelligence and capability of the interpreter is also something that must be considered here. 

Turing next sought to replace the man with a machine and continue the game. 

• Will the interrogator be able to distinguish between the woman and the machine now?

• Can the interrogator correctly pinpoint that one is the man and the other is the woman?

• He mapped this problem to the now confounding question “Can machines think?”

Ultimately the purpose of this experiment was to investigate whether a person could distinguish between a human and a machine, if the machine spoke as if it could think. One isn’t interested in knowing whether the machine is capable of original thought, but whether it can appear to convey original or human-like thought. Because, and we come back to it, we still don’t know where original thought comes from. We’re clueless as to what intelligence is, what is thought, how we think and act. 

Alan Turing’s question in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” goes on to describe the modern day computer beginning at Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. He ultimately ignores the question whether machines can think, but goes on to say that they can be programmed to do so, they can be linguistically the same as humans.

Just by speaking like a human being, the computer can ape a person realistically. It’s basically a copycat. But you may argue, isn’t that how children learn? By copying their mother’s speech? Are children capable of “original thinking” unless trained to do so? Similarly, the computers have now been trained to a degree, wherein their accuracy is adult-like, they make mistakes just as humans do (for which they are not as yet held accountable), they learn and better themselves. But it all started by aping. By copying. The next level is outsmarting. But as we now know about the Game of Go, even that level is not out-of-reach for the “mere” machines. 

Read Turing’s Full Paper:  COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE

Does AI know it is thinking?

• Yes
• No

A Brief Historical Timeline of The Evolution of AI: 10 Key Events that Shaped the Growth of Artificial Intelligence

1. 1950 

Alan Turing wrote a ground-breaking research paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence”. The paper gave a test for machine intelligence which is formulated in the Imitation Game. 

2. 1951

Marvin Minsky and Dean built the first artificial neural network SNARC. 

3. 1955

The now-famous Dartmouth workshop on the topic "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence”, was submitted by John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky of Harvard University, Nathaniel Rochester from IBM and Claude Shannon from Bell Telephone Laboratories. This workshop is considered the birthplace of artificial intelligence. 

4. 1959

John McCarthy wrote a paper called “Programs with Common Sense” which laid the foundations of “reasoning” in artificial intelligence. 

5. 1969

Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish their paper Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry. It is credited with diminishing the interest in neural networks. 

6. 1973

A report to the British Science Research Council by James Lighthill was the cause of the start of the AI winter. He said that the sector did not have significant breakthroughs, which led to the reduction in government funding. 

7. 1986

David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams publish the paper "Learning representations by back-propagating errors”. In this paper they described the backpropagation algorithm which allowed neural networks to learn better. 

8. 1997 

IBM’s Deep Blue beats Gary Kasparov in a six-game match. This challenged the notion that computers can’t beat humans in a game of strategy, proving that they are indeed better than humans because of their ability to calculate millions of moves ahead. 

9. 2009

Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan and Andrew Ng published their paper "Large-scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors," which postulated that GPUs can outperform multi-core CPUs for deep learning tasks.

10. 2022

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is launched. It’s a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that was unleashed on the world. It’s widely used to provide free therapy.