Artificial Intelligence Vs. Human Intelligence

Nov 29, 2019 Posted by Dr. Nidhi Arora in Artificial Intelligence, Head Scratch | 1 comment

Artificial Intelligence Vs. Human Intelligence

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Human intelligence is generally associated with cognitive characteristics like perception, adaptation, attention, understanding, planning and decision-making. Intelligence is often applied in building systems to have logical characteristics of humans. Since the day of invention, computers have gradually shown the abilities to carry out complex and compute intensive tasks transforming them to AI machines.

With the continuing advances in technology, AI machines have gained more speed and memory than before. But, the technology hasn’t matured enough to reach the computational ability of the human brain. It is not possible to create a true Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine with the existing technology. It will still take almost a decade or more for AI machines to equal human brain’s computational power. Taking this fact too optimistically, human beings should not assume that they can never be outperformed by machines?

Maturity of Artificial Intelligence

Till a decade back, Artificial Intelligence was a just a futuristic speculation, but with the development and innovation in the AI domain, a shift in paradigm has been witnessed. Those systems which were only thought earlier can now be seen in real-time. Through the years of maturity, Artificial Intelligence have significantly shown the transformation of business processes within the organization. Looking at the growth of Artificial Intelligence, business people have collaborated with smart machines more closely to change their dreams into reality.

The business of the 21st century have timely sensed the need of the hour and are already using AI systems to have a competitive edge. This clearly indicates that people who have understood the importance of AI systems have jumped in, to avoid the chances of falling behind. Computation, competition and innovation are parts of doing business. It’s a rare combination which can be achieved by organizations in their best interests. This allows them to cooperate not only with other humans, but with machines also to address the challenges and business problems more efficiently and in less time.

Artificial Intelligence for Problem Solving

Artificial Intelligence machines have started giving benefits to humans in various ways to ease their life. These machines can learn by gaining knowledge and performing tasks to imitate humans. Artificial Intelligence enables these machines to have human-like capabilities to interact with their environment for problem-solving. Although there exist a wider choice of machine learning algorithms to supplement Artificial Intelligence, the outcome is not as real as natural intelligence. An AI machine is helpless without human instructions, both in terms of the amount and type of data it has to use and the mathematics it has to apply.

The increased complexity of problems has given direction and progression to technology. Deep neural networks enable AI algorithms to analyze data through multiple layers. The underlying principal remains unchanged to drive the task through data to make AI machines to learn. The learning process of deep neural networks is the same as a child learning, but they can’t process information the same way a human brain does. The reason is simple!! These networks are highly dependent on data and need to be trained, even to do a simple task. The requirement of data and training increases with the complexity of mathematical and logical computations, if not proportionately. A Neural network is known to be a black box due to it’s nature. One can only see the input and output of these systems without having any idea of how it is being done internally.

According to the theory of human psychology, general intelligence is measured by a g-factor. This g-factor is the measure of the degree to which one type of cognitive ability is related to other cognitive abilities. As measured based on this theory, current AI applications cannot be characterized to have intelligence.

How Artificial Intelligence Complements Human Intelligence?

There are numerous ways in which artificial intelligence of machines and natural intelligence of humans complement each another. Humans, together with digital assistants can do wonders. The combination can generate far better results than either the most experienced human expert or the most advanced computer with complex algorithms can do individually. These human-computer collaborations have permeated in everyone’s life.

When we look around, we can see many familiar examples. Intuitive reasoning of humans combined with classification capabilities of computers can result in best predictions. E.g., weather forecasting, stock market prediction, medical condition prediction, etc. Combination of human’s knowledge and machine’s feature extraction power can result in the best of hybrid classifications. E.g., Medical diagnostic system, crop classification, separating defective products, etc. These practical applications have reported promising results due to the right combination of human intelligence with machine’s artificial intelligence. The potential AI augmented applications are in manufacturing, healthcare, control systems, schedulers, logistics, biometric identification and many others where outsmart automated systems play an important role.

Are Artificial Intelligence systems as Intelligent as Humans?

Human Intelligence is characterized by the quality of the mind with capabilities like learning from experience, adapting to the environment, handling unstructured information, etc. Human intelligence increases with the interaction with the environment, by perception and observations. In addition to these, humans have other logical capabilities which include creativity, reasoning, decision making, thinking, social conduct, etc.

Artificial Intelligence, as the name suggests, is simulated intelligence in machines to think and act like humans. This intelligence provides machines the ability to analyze the environments in which they are put and to produce actions to maximize their performance measure. The goal of Artificial Intelligence is to impose the most basic qualities of humans including learning, reasoning, and perception. These Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines have multi-disciplinary behavior based on psychology, mathematics, computer science and many more. The combination of mathematics and computer science lends a significant hand in the learning process of these machines. Programmed to work accurately on a set of existing datasets, the AI machines can gradually respond to unseen problems also.

Is it correct to say that AI machines are designed and controlled by humans?

Talking rationally, humans have an inherent nature of making mistakes. Due to these mistakes, humans have to redo the same task again and again. But this also let them gain new knowledge to improve their intellect. On the other hand, machines are flawless, smart and accurate. Everything they do has some calculations behind it and can be explained in terms of formulas in mathematics. For these reasons, AI machines are designed and controlled by humans to contribute to their life.

Are these arguments sufficient to believe that AI machines have become as brainy as humans?

AI research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, economics, control theory, probability, optimization, and logic. It would not be wrong to say that AI machines have become more intelligent over a period of time. They also have obtained the capabilities which we usually associate with human beings like perception, thinking, decision making etc.

Can humans make something smarter than themselves?

This is true that humans have made devices like calculators and computers to make their work easier and faster, but this is also a fact that nobody can design something smarter than them. When Artificial Intelligent machines were first conceptualized, they were almost impossible to implement due to the lack of technology. With the advent of high-speed CPUs and GPUs etc., these systems are now evolving. Humans might not have realized the speed of growth of these machines at the first place, but now these are widely used as digital assistants on varied domains. Computers have much more computational power than human brain. Although, human brain seems to be faster than computers, but computers have improved in processing speed during last few years.

From all above arguments, it is indicative that the collective intelligence of humans and AI machines can perform almost all tasks better with improved reliability and more statistically significant evolving over a period of time.