People are afraid of whether or not AI will take over their jobs. Especially knowledge workers – like me.
So I keep wrapping my head around the quest of what makes humans unique versus AI. If you’re interested in that too follow along with my thought pattern.
Humans are a form of intelligence. Just like many forms in the universe, but especially here on Earth ‘intelligence’ as I define it is wildly present.
I define intelligence as the ability to gather (learn), contextualize and enrich (model), and creating (apply) information. The more information, the higher the form of intelligence.
Throughout evolution on Earth – I’m skipping the rest of the universe on purpose – from leptons and quarks (tiny parts) we’ve managed to create and enrich a biological form that we call life. And life is here in all kinds of forms, of which we humans think human life is the most intelligent (also I’m not going into that rabbit hole).
Learning, modeling, and applying information. We’ve taught that to our (evolving into human) species for the last 2 million years. And that information is stored in DNA and culture, expressing itself via brains into the real world.
And since we have computers, from the ’50s of the 20th century, we’re trying to make those machines mimic or perform one or multiple tasks that humans can: learning, modeling and applying.
The first machines BC could ‘apply’, but without looking intelligent in any way. Like the printing press, windmills, or steam engines.
Then we started to improve the machines. Give them multiple functionalities, started to become more of what we call intelligent.
And now we’re at the point where Artificial Intelligence – a form of intelligence in machines we call computers, that we have created – is getting good at learning, modeling, and applying.
This is frightening us humans.
Because we can 1. make robots.
And we can 2. program them to learn, model, and apply.
So what’s so unique in us humans, that we can’t teach computers (yet) how to mimic it?
That’s ‘emotions’.
There’s an IQ and an EQ, on which we, humans, measure human performance.
Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Quotient.
Intelligence seems more about how much we know and model.
Emotional seems more about how much we can apply.
Emotions are very hard to understand for machines, because they’re often irrational, contradictory, subjective, personal and completely inefficient. That’s hard to teach to a machine.
That’s why in 2023 real creativity is currently still exclusive for humans.
Just as that you currently can’t train an AI to be selfless, like some humans act and are.
And somewhere there’s even ‘consciousness’, which is hard to define for humans and therefore hard to understand for machines.
Because we program machines via language. And if we humans still have limited understanding of certain things – let’s call it information -, it’s hard to program machines to learn, model and apply that information.
Some things just have too many variables that we humans have been imprinting in our DNA and culture for thousands and thousands of years.
And yes, technology will evolve exponentially, and even though we can’t comprehend that as humans, quite soon AI might be able to do any human thing.
So currently AI isn’t human because of emotions.
So if you’re a human and you strive for excellence in your life, it might be time to invest in your emotional abilities more than in intelligence.
One step at a time.
Note
I had a long and deep conversation about this with ChatGPT. It’s in English and partially in Dutch. Surely translate it when you feel the need to know it all. https://chat.openai.com/share/f3dcea6b-c176-4528-bf9a-5e60ebfbf6c3