“Are you intelligent?”
It’s a simple question and almost all the time the answer is yes. It’s funny in a way that majority of us believe that we are above average in intelligence. A recent study showed that 65% of Americans believe that they are above average in intelligence of US population. By definition 65% cannot be above average. But that’s who we are. Humans. Driven by ego. Now, let’s rephrase the question.
“How do you know you are intelligent?”
The question is simple but when we stop and contemplate on this, soon we realize that the answer is not that simple. To make sense of things let’s go down the rabbit hole which will take us through intelligence, neuroscience, psychology and all the way to artificial intelligence.
Easiest cop out answers to the above question would be; “I have passed these these exams”; “I am a doctor, engineer or a scientist”; “I can do high dimensional mathematics in my head”; and so on. All are true and there is no argument there. Obviously a less intelligent person will not be able to do such things. We all can agree that the great minds like Leonardo da Vinci, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Hawking are indeed intelligent. But, is that all intelligence is?
What about Beethoven, Mozart and Bach? What about Shakespeare and Dostoevsky? What about Gandhi and Mother Teresa? What about Napoleon and Genghis Khan? Creating the timeless works of art, healing countless souls, conquering the world; Shouldn’t these be counted as intelligent as well? It’s easier to say yes, but that brings up more questions than answers; questions on how to measure intelligence across such seemingly unrelated fields? what are the benchmarks?
Well, what about the IQ test? One may ask. Can’t it measure intelligence? Actually for a long time the world accepted it as the standard and more or less it still is. The words such as Genius, Moron and Idiot in fact came to be due the ‘Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale’. (Fun fact: The word Genius wasn’t related to higher intelligence nor words like Moron, Imbecile and Idiot were related to lower intelligence before this test was introduced. They were just neutral words.)
Many understand that these kinds of IQ tests are not good measures of intelligence. (I personally believe that they still are good measures for many of the practical purposes). Usually these measures aspects such as
- Fluid reasoning
- Knowledge
- Quantitative Reasoning
- Visual/Spatial Reasoning
- Working memory
All of which are very much what we expect from an intelligent person.
As an alternative we have Dr. Gardner’s ‘Multiple Intelligence Theory’ which covers a vast range of aspects rather than being confined to reasoning and analytical skills. It categorizes intelligence into 9 fields.
- Linguistics and Verbal
- Logical/Mathematical
- Spatial-Visual
- Body-Kinesthetic
- Musical
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Naturalistic
Though this seems like a solution; for me personally, it feels like a way of making everyone happy by including everyone in to some category of intelligence rather than providing an answer for intelligence measurement. If one think without bias and without putting emotions in to it, how can an athlete or a gymnast who has a good Body-Kinesthetic intelligence can be put in the same intelligence level as Stephen Hawking. I can’t agree with that. And I won’t. A monkey can jump around from tree to tree perfectly; does that make it intelligent?
Now to make things more awkward; let’s bring a dog into the mix :). Every dog owner knows how smart a dog can be. Sure, somethings you train, but most of the smart things a dog would do surpasses the intelligence of a human baby (sometimes even that of an adult). Can a dog be considered intelligent ? Why not ? Because it doesn’t do high level analytical and logical thinking ? Well, with that logic, since a person with Body-Kinesthetic or Naturalistic intelligence doesn’t do analytical and logical thinking; he or she cannot be considered intelligent as well. This is why I am not a big fan of multiple intelligence theory. Let’s say we welcome the dog to our so called ‘intelligent’ group; then what about primates ? What about Dolphins ? Where do we draw the line ? At what point do we say “okay, this is where the intelligence begins?”
To be bit more controversial; let’s bring race and culture to the play. It is obvious that what is considered very intelligent in certain cultures can be down right moronic when compared to another. Where you grew up, the people you had in your surrounding definitely affect the psychology of a person which in turn impact their intelligence positively or negatively. (yes, there are exceptions, but it’s true for the most of the cases). There is no way a tribal person from deep amazon jungle can even begin to compete with a modern western scientist. Plus the racial slags, vernacular and other cultural aspects definitely affect the intelligence of a person or at least when measuring the intelligence. For example; if we were to take an above average intelligence person from United States and another from England and give them the same set of questions which uses the metric system; most probably the American will fail miserably. But if we were to reverse the situation and use imperial measurements in the questions then the Englishman would most probably fail. Does that make either of them less intelligent ? Well no, unless knowing both metric and imperial measurement systems is considered an aspect of being intelligent.
Which brings us to the next confusion. The working memory and the knowledge. It is scientifically found that having a higher capacity working memory makes you more intelligent. It’s not that hard to grasp. We all know that having a better RAM in our computer makes it more powerful because it can access the information quickly and respond quickly. Similarly if the capacity of the working memory (the short term memory) is high, then it is much likely that such a person would be able to outperform most of the others in many cognitive tasks. But what happens when one has a good working memory but doesn’t know how to use it ? Like having a good RAM but a crappy operating system.
For me and my colleagues, it is important to know different types of intelligence and how to benchmark these. What I have realized is that we as humans are putting our ego in to play and that kind of makes things difficult and inefficient. The perception of majority is that an artificial intelligence should be taken seriously only if it achieves human level cognition. Here we have put ourselves as the gold standard for intelligence. That’s just crazy. Who are we to say that what we have can actually be called intelligence ? Seems like it’s our ego which is at play here.
Now we have come a long way down the rabbit hole; there is no point in turning back. Let’s keep moving 🙂
We have on average around 0.1% difference in DNA with each other and roughly about 7% difference in DNA with our closest relatives; the apes. This 7% difference is what made us the world dominating species and enabled us to achieve all the greatness which an ape cannot even begin to comprehend. (Opposable thumbs doesn’t count since most of the primates and few other animals do have that feature and we don’t see them building rockets and skyscrapers) So, what’s wrong with being intelligent than apes? One may ask. Well, nothing. But if we consider this 7% difference gap as the intelligent difference between an ape and a human, what happens if there is an alien race which has 7% difference in DNA with humans on the same direction that the humans are to apes. Wouldn’t our intelligence be considered as stupid as a rock compared to these beings? Wouldn’t our scientific achievements be ‘cute’ for such intelligence ? Probably the babies of such a species would be able to do all the complex mathematics and string theory like we do one plus one.
Measuring intelligence is not an easy task. And by putting intelligence with reference to human intelligence, while providing a reference point for many practical purposes, puts a restrain on the freedom of true artificial intelligence development. Why does the A.I. has to be able to solve the problems the same way we do? Most of the things we do are extremely ineffective. For example; verbal communication has so many defects. Its slow, its prone to misunderstandings, different languages, different pronunciations, and so on. Then why should an A.I. be able to speak for it to be considered as intelligent?
Long time back; when robotics and AI were gaining popularity, we wanted humanoid robots to do all our daily work, including driving the car. This is a good example of our human thinking. We wanted to replace the driver with a robot. Okay, so what’s wrong with that ? Well, why does it has to be a humanoid robot be your driver; why not we give the car itself the ability to drive. Saves us time, space and it’s far more effective. Thankfully somewhere along the way we were smart enough to throw away the humanoid driver idea and go with driver-less cars and today we enjoy the self driving cars.
The point is that; if we look at intelligence taking ourselves as the reference, that might not bring out the best solutions. This does not in anyway suggest that we shouldn’t be looking in to human brain to understand intelligence. In-fact studying and trying to mimic human brain is one of the most promising areas in our journey towards artificial general intelligence.
For me, human brain is the single most complex and most powerful machinery that has ever existed. With all our technology we have only just begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the brain. With an average of 100 Billion neurons with 1 Quadrillion synaptic connections (yes, a Quadrillion with a Q, that’s 1 followed by 15 zeros); there is no machine which can even come close to the complexity of a human brain. On top of these; throw in the fact that certain brain cells can adjust themselves to perform tasks that they weren’t even designed to, puts the human brain in to its own super league.
Intelligence is something that not everyone or everything can reach. If we start to become politically correct in order to make everyone feel good it will only dilute what it means to be truly intelligent. My point is that we shouldn’t expand the definition of intelligence to the point that it loses its meaning. It’s like giving medals to everyone who participates in a competition; it devalues the ones who actually has the talent and won. Lets try not to disrespect all the great minds that brought us all that we take for granted today by putting them to the same category as the common man. Intelligence is something to be admired. Something to be amazed by. Something to respect. If we don’t give intelligence the place it deserves we will never take artificial intelligence seriously until we realize that we have become the 7% DNA lagging apes in front of the inevitable artificial super intelligence.