Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Rival Human Thinking?

Some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems, at least the ones the public hear about, are famous for beating human players at chess or poker. Other algorithms are known for their ability to learn how to recognize cats or their inability to recognize people with darker skin.

But are current AI systems anything more than toys? Sure, their ability to play games or identify animals is impressive, but does this help toward creating useful AI systems? To answer this, we need to take a step back and question what the goals of AI are.

The fundamental idea behind AI is simple: To analyze patterns from the past to make accurate predictions about the future.

This idea underlies every algorithm, from Google showing you adverts of what it predicts you want to buy, to predicting whether an image of a face is you or your neighbor. AI is also being used to predict whether patients have cancer or not from analyzing medical records and scans.

Pluribus, the poker playing bot, was able to beat the world’s top poker players in 2019 by being able to predict it could out-bluff the humans.

Making predictions requires incredible amounts of data and the power to process it quickly. Pluribus, for example, filters data from billions of card games in a matter of milliseconds. It stiches patterns together to predict the best possible hand to play, always looking back at its data history to achieve the task at hand, never wondering what it means to look forward.

Pluribus, AlphaGo, Amazon Rekognition ― there are many algorithms out there that are incredibly effective at their job, some so good they can beat human experts.

All these examples are proof of how powerful AI can be at making predictions. The question is which task you want it to be good at.

Facial recognition AI software is already being used to identify people in countries like ChinaImage: David Mcnew/AFP/Getty Images

AI systems can really only do one task. Pluribus, for example, is so task-specific that it can’t even play another card game like blackjack, let alone drive a car or plan world domination.

This is very much unlike human intelligence. One of our key features is that we can generalize. We become highly skilled at different skills throughout life  ― learning everything from how to walk, how to play card games or how to write articles. We might specialize in a few of those skills, even making a career out of some, but we’re still capable of learning and performing other tasks in our lives.

What’s more, we can also transfer skills, using knowledge of one thing to acquire skills in another. AI systems fundamentally don’t work this way.