What separates us from AI?

Today we use lots of time to think, why does AI decrease our IQ? The answer is this: this modern time where we live benefits superficial people. Our working life encourages us to have maximum velocity. There is nothing wrong with the velocity-based working life. But the problem is that the measurement tools for velocity are things like how many executions we make during our working day. The measurement tool can be how many screws we tight. Or how much money we bring to our employer. 

Deep thinking is not encouraged in our working life. When somebody sits in a coding company, that person should use the AI assistant. Can you even seriously imagine that you would go to the library and borrow a book about the problems? And would you have time to stop deeply thinking about things that something really means? How often in the week, do we discuss philosophically and think deeply about things that we really see? We can do many things without deep thinking and logic. 

And when we think about things like some 1970s chess simulators, we must ask ourselves are those things really thinking? Do some ATARI, or Commodore 64 really think? It can drive a car on screen, but does it think? The system can move chess buttons and win chess games or some formula games against humans. But is that a mark of advanced thinking? Or does the horse, who sees three fingers and knocks the floor three times using its hoof, be some doctor of philosophy? Is a chess simulator with 64 kb memory more intelligent than some university professor? Maybe that thing is not as versatile as a professor. 

The IQ is something only if we compare it with something else. If we play chess alone or make something else, we don't need to be intelligent. If we are surrounded by people who have an extremely high IQ, in that case even a high IQ doesn't mean impressive. Same way. If our only opponent in a chess game is Garry Kasparov. That makes all of us seem like very bad chess players. Then we can think how ordinary chess player Kasparov is. Did an ordinary player play 2533 matches at the world champion level and win 1371 of those games? That means 54,13% winning games. But that happened at the highest possible level of the chess game. So does an ordinary player ever reach that level? 

But if the professor wins the AI in chess that is not news. The news is that the professor, some AI chatbot, or quantum computer loses a chess game against that machine. Nobody cares how many things the professor made before that chess game. Nobody even cares if the professor plays that person’s first chess game. And nobody even asked if the AI played chess before, or did the AI even knew how to move buttons. In the same way, a professor might not necessarily play chess at all. The fact is that all geniuses don’t even play chess. And if AI learns like humans, there must be something there that gets things like button movements. The computer can play chess but it might not do anything else. 

Normally we say that AI simply mimics things and then it doesn’t have a deep knowledge of things that it makes. When I read about that kind of thing, I sometimes remember one question from philosophy exams. That question is: “What separates philosophical thinking from the every day, or regular thinking?”. The answer is that philosophical thinking is deeper and more analytic than regular thinking. And that brings new questions into my mind. That is when we last exercise philosophical, deep thinking?”. When we do something, like turn screws in workplaces, do we really think about the purpose of that action? 

How deep out thinking? And how deeply do we think about things that we do in everyday life? The thing that’s enough is that we do what we must and that’s it. We have no time to think deeply about what some screw or other things can do. We simply do our job and that’s it. The thing is that humans learn through mimicking. We know many things. We know how to drive cars and use computers. We know how to fly airplanes and still, we don’t know anything about those things. We can drive cars. But we don’t need to know what happens in the car when we pull the gas pedal. We know that cars accelerate, but we must not know how cars make that thing. 

We could put the car to react with the gas pedal two ways. We can make physical contact between the gas pedal and the engine. Or we can use a camera that registers the gas pedal’s position. Then the AI accelerates or brakes the vehicle. For that system, the AI doesn't need any deep knowledge of things that it does. The system must simply accelerate the electric engines if we use electric cars. And the fact is that the AI must not even know what an electric engine is. When a car accelerates the system can involve code there is the word “engine”. Then some control circuits have a code that makes it react to the signal that is meant for the engine. 

Same way, if we hear the word that is our name, we automatically react to that thing. Our name is the thing that activates our attention. Sometimes we think about our names. But we forget that we learn that thing. Why cannot our name be C3PO? Because our parents didn’t give that name to us. Our names are “Jacks” and “Jills” because our parents gave those names to us. But have we ever wondered why some names are reserved for girls and others for boys?  And then we learn that those words are our names. 

But if our parents would give the name C3PO to us. We would react to that as our name. But do we ever imagine, why cannot our name be C3PO? Because we never thought that before. Then we can go back to begin, and ask how to describe thinking. Does thinking mean that we think how many times we hit some nails? Or does thinking mean how many chess games we learn? 

The thing is this: if we drive about 10000 kilometers without accidents or we win millions of chess games in our life that is not news. The news is that if some robot car drives off the road. Or if some supercomputer loses a chess game to some ATARI chess machine. Those things can be translated into that maybe the ATARI chess machine is more intelligent than humans and supercomputers.