Human Artificial Intelligence.

A Japanese woman demonstrated an AI robot that could easily pass an entrance exam to a top university. She wasn’t excited as you might expect but worried because she knew her robot had zero understanding of what it was doing. It simply looked words up in Wikipedia, statistically analysed related words and chose the highest probability answers. That’s basically what all AI does. Though it can analyse language a thousand times faster than a human it doesn’t ‘read’ its meaning it runs maths on the words as simply numerical values. Now I passed a similar exam and went to uni. I spent three years learning maths and physics and got a degree. So far so good. Then I went into industry and quickly learnt I didn’t know a thing. I had artificial intelligence. Luckily I had acquired experience and cunning elsewhere and quickly assimilated the two into useful real intelligence but many, often those who got good degrees, persisted with their version of AI and though they got good jobs they didn’t often move things forward. They only knew how to think inside the box. (think Rick Astley compared to Queen, Michael Jackson or the Beatles) The corollary of the above demonstration is that our current form of education is teaching kids to achieve what artificial intelligence can do a thousand times better, i.e. regurgitate facts and choose the right tick box. We’re teaching our kids to come a distant second to a laptop. Already algorithms and AI are being used to coerce us mere humans into doing their will, well the will of their owners, and it can’t be long before their owners are relying in them coerce themselves. For what it’s worth learn to think upside-down. Take a problem or a set of facts and turn them upside-down, throw them up in the air and see how they land like a snow globe. Put together unrelated facts, an unrelated use, a different material over and over till an answer appeals. AI can’t do that because it doesn’t understand.