Intelligence, real and artificial

We humans have been working on artificial intelligence for a long time. At least fifty years, by my count, and through most of that time, true artificial intelligence has been consistently "twenty years away".

Of course, one should not talk solely about artificial intelligence. We humans have what we style as real intelligence. Perhaps the term "organic intelligence" is more appropriate, as human intelligence evolved organically over the ages. Let's not argue too much about terms.

The human mind is a strange thing. It is the only thing in the universe that can examine itself. (At least, it's the only one that we humans know about.)

There are many models of the human mind. We have studied the anatomy, the physiology, the chemistry, ... and we still understand little about how it works. Freud studied the human psyche (close enough to the mind for this essay) and Skinner studied animal behaviors with reward systems, and we still know little about the mind.

But there is one model that strikes me as useful when developing artificial intelligence: the notion of the human brain as two different but connected processors.

In this model, humans have not one but two processors: one slow and linear, the other fast and parallel. The slow, linear processor gives us analytical thought, math, logic, and language. The parallel side gives us intuition, using s a pattern-matching system.

The logical side is easy for us to examine. It is linear and relatively slow, and since it has language, it can talk to us. We can follow a chain of reasoning and understand how we arrive at an answer. (We can also explain our reasoning to another person, or write it down.)

The intuitive side is difficult to examine. It is parallel and relatively fast, and since it does not have language, it cannot explain how it arrives at an answer. We don't know why we get the results we get.

From an evolution point of view, it is easy to see how we developed the intuitive (pattern-matching) side. Our ancestors were successful when they identified a rabbit (and ate it) and identified a tiger (and ran away from it). Pattern matching is quite useful for survival.

It is less clear how we evolved the linear-logical side of our brain. Slow, analytic thought may be helpful for survival, but perhaps not as helpful as avoiding tigers. Communication is clearly a benefit when living in groups. No matter how it arose, we have it.

These two sides make up our brain. (Yes, I am aware that there are various levels of the brain, all the way down to the brain stem, but bear with me.)

Humans are successful, I believe, because we have both the logical and the intuitive processors. We use both brains in our everyday life, from recognizing other humans and breakfast cereal, and we think about business strategies and algebra homework. We pick the right processor for the problem at hand.

Now let's shift from our human intelligence to ... not artificial intelligence but computer intelligence, such as it is.

Traditional computing is our logic, math-oriented brains with a turbocharger. Computers are fast, and can perform calculations rapidly and reliably, but they don't have "common sense", or the intuition that we humans use. While fast, we can examine the program and understand how a computer arrives at a result.

Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, corresponds to the intuitive side of human intelligence. It can solve problems (relatively quickly) many times through pattern-matching techniques. And, just as the human intuitive, pattern-matching brain cannot explain how it arrives at a result, neither can artificial intelligence systems. We cannot simple examine the program and look at some variables to understand how the result was determined.

So now we have two artificial systems, one logical and one intuitive systems. These two types of "intelligence" are the two types in humans.

The real advance will be to combine the traditional computing systems (the logical systems) with artificial intelligence (the pattern-matching systems), just as our brains combine the two. Bringing the two disparate systems into one will be necessary for true, Skynet-class, Forbin-class, HAL-9000-class, artificial intelligence.

I expect that joining the two will be quite the challenge. We understand little about our human brains and how the logical and intuitive processors coordinate their work. Getting the logical and intuitive computer systems to work together will be (I think) a long effort.

But when we get it -- watch out!