Thursday, September 25, 2014

Understanding the nature of intelligence


I love this cartoon from xkcd, it pretty much sums up my entire career which (simplified) consists of explaining to non computer-literate people (customers, sales people, journalists, friends etc.) why some things are hard for computers to do but easy for human beings to do. The main culprit in this misunderstanding is the fact that, when comparing the difficulty of problems to do with reasoning, people often don't allow for the following fact...

Human "understanding" stands on the shoulders of 4.5 billion years of Biological evolution, 10,000 years of cultural evolution and dozens of years of life experience. Computers, on the other hand, are just boxes of electronic components that can add numbers really, really quickly. To expect similar results from brain processes and computer programs (as they are done today) is simply unrealistic.

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