CAN COMPUTERS BE AS INTELLIGENT AS HUMANS?

This is a chapter in the book below, and one I personally found very interesting myself. While writing this book with an open mind, doing much research and thinking, I myself learned a lot. When I began this particular chapter I was just certain that human beings were quite smart, and that computers were just tools and were dumb. But at the end of the chapter, I began to question what is it that we hold so dear about human intelligence? Is it really that hard to duplicate? It left me with an odd feeling. It made me think of the several movies that have been out where computers and machines take over the world. But at the very least, it gives us humans some very serious philosophy items to think about.

There are perhaps two important parts to human intelligence, at least. The first is knowledge, and the second is the reasoning ability to use that knowledge. As most of us have become aware, the ability of computer memory to memorize huge amounts of books, and even photos and videos goes way beyond what the human mind can do. So computers begin with being able to do one of the two parts of intelligence, the knowledge part, extremely well. Few of us would try to have our memories compete with being able to memorize books word for word with that of a computer and computer memory. We would lose every time - unless of course we cheat and spill our coffee into the computer inner memory workings.

As for the second part of intelligence, the reasoning ability, that of course can be broken into several items. Over perhaps the last 20 years we have seen the internet and software become quite good at information retrieval. Nowadays it is quite common to type something into a search engine or just verbally ask "Siri" or "Okay Google" or other device a question that they scour the internet for. And so information retrieval ... is already there for computers.

Some of us who do software are also aware that computers can be taught to learn or at least find things out within their "senses" and some of us have even done a bit of that programming. And so computers can now, with the right software, be able to learn and then use that knowledge. Perhaps what is left is creativity, which may at times, as in humans, require arms for experimentation. And so perhaps some robotic function might be needed. Well, here, computers might have to slow down their blinding speed and might be no faster than we humans. However, they can work through the night. As for that portion of creativity that might be thought of as new groupings of different kinds of knowledge, well there, the high speed may still be there.

When we put this all together... we may begin to wonder what do we even mean by human intelligence? Is it that unique? Or can we simply duplicate it? And if we cannot duplicate it today, perhaps tomorrow when we can might not be all that far off. More in the book of course. But then again, this at least for me is something that goes beyond ... and is now a very serious question in my mind. Well, the point of the book is not to convince anyone of anything, but perhaps to get all of us, including me, to think more, about some basic things.

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