November 29th to December 9th 2022 : Extended Intelligences¶
The past two weeks have been about learning the basics of Artificial Intelligence with Taller Estampa, Ramon Sangüesa Sole and Lucas Lorenzo Peña. One of the big questions in the field is of course « What is intelligence ». Age old question. Intelligence is textured, it’s multifaceted, and so are the machines we program.
We talked about Plato and Aristotle and their debate on Symbols VS Senses and how neither were entirely right: it’s a spectrum. (Symbols = innate responses + Senses = seeing information and then assigning a response) But machines often have a rigid position on this spectrum whereas humans don’t.
So intelligence is not a fixed repertoire of knowledge, it’s something that can evolve in relation with the environment (it has some degree of autonomy). AI systems have to read situations and remove as much ambiguity as they can with their feedback loops.
What’s wild is there is so little difference is in how human brains function. The human brain is might be more complex so far but it’s based on the exact same principles. The only true difference is in the intention. We set the program for how our machines will process and act on information. But when we discover who built our program I’m not sure we’ll be as cheeky as some of the AIs we explored this week.
I had a dream sometime during this course: that I was an AI. Images flashed before my mind and I categorized them. It was peaceful. So do Androids dream of electric sheep or do humans as well?