Difference between artificial and human intelligence may be smaller than you think
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made spectacular progress in the last two decades. Computers can now diagnose medical images, predict customer behaviour, manage financial portfolios, compose poetry, and even generate art. The AI can do some of these things better than humans. As AI marches furiously towards becoming increasingly smart systems, an old philosophical question has returned to haunt us: Is human intelligence qualitatively different from artificial intelligence, or are their differences only quantitative?
The revolution in AI is primarily powered by a class of algorithms called artificial neural networks. These algorithms process large quantities of data and extract statistical patterns from it. When called upon to perform a task, they simply match the input data to the most relevant patterns to compute the result.
Such computational pattern matching is surprisingly powerful and can simulate many functions of human intelligence. Consider the game of chess which requires a synthesis of multiple abilities such as tactical thought, strategic patience, risk analysis, imagination, and foresight. Garry Kasparov wrote in 2007, “Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.” Computers today easily defeat the best of human grandmasters. If they can emulate these human-like abilities by reducing them to patterns, can all of human intelligence be reduced to mere pattern matching? Or do our brains have a secret sauce that cannot be recreated computationally?
Despite their astonishing successes, there is no denying that present AI systems suffer some obvious limitations. They are brittle and can be easily fooled by making small modifications to the input data. They are incapable of solving problems that deviate even slightly from what they were designed for. And they are data-hungry and need unreasonably large volumes of data to learn from. Critics use variations of these limitations to conclude that there exists a fundamental difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.
This, however, may be a premature conclusion. If we look closer, it turns out that humans also suffer from these same limitations!
Consider the brittleness of AI. Researchers at Google demonstrated that a computer vision model was easily fooled into thinking a banana was a toaster just by adding a small image patch next to it. Images intentionally constructed to mislead AI models are called adversarial images. A 2018 paper shows that adversarial images that fool many AI models also fool humans if they are asked to make instantaneous decisions in limited time. Nature abounds with cases where one species purposefully adopts adversarial techniques designed to hack the behaviour of another species. Cuckoo birds not only lay eggs in nests of other birds, but cuckoo chicks fool their foster parents into feeding them more plentifully than their own offspring.
Marketing professionals are no strangers to the irrationality of the human mind as amply illustrated by Dan Ariely in his book ‘Predictably Irrational’. The decisions we make are not always a product of conscious thought, but often outputs of subconscious processes that occur below our horizon of awareness. Simple tricks can significantly influence our decisions, just like adversarial examples can fool AI.
