Will Artificial Intelligence Surpass Human Intellect Soon?

As AIs around the world start to surpass our own intellect, we ask how human should we make machines?

- George Zarkadakis

Back in the summer of 1956, the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI) gathered at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, to christen the new science and set its goals. Their concept of ‘human intelligence’ was quite narrow and specific. Computers would do what a rational, educated and mature man – for he was a man, and not a woman, that the fathers had in mind – did. He would use his knowledge and logic to solve complex problems. It was a goal that went beyond the purely numerical processing that computers were used for at that time.

The new science of artificial intelligence required a different computer that was capable of creating, storing and accessing knowledge, applying logical rules to facts and data, asking questions, concluding new facts, making decisions, and providing explanations for its reasoning and actions. Years before, the English mathematician Alan Turing had imagined an intelligent machine as one that would converse in our language and convince us of its human-ness. Nevertheless, the foundational machine intelligence aspirations had nothing to do with human feelings, morals, or consciousness. Although language understanding was included in the goals of early AI, the intention was not to replicate the human mind in a machine, but only mimic certain practical aspects of it. Besides, in the late 1950s our knowledge about the brain and mind was still in its infancy.

And yet, the temptation to think big was evident from the start. Already since 1943, pioneering neuroscientist Warren McCulloch and logician Walter Pitts had demonstrated the similarities between electronics and neurons. What if we could reproduce the whole human brain, with all of its intricate wiring, in an electronic computer? What if instead of describing to the computer how to think, we let it think by itself, and consequently evolve a ‘mind’ of its own? What if we made AI more human?