Article by Geoff Mulgan: “…The roots of the word intelligence (drawing on the Latin words ‘inter’ and ‘legere’. to choose between) are a reminder that intelligence is not processing speed but rather the ability to choose between options. As such intelligence only makes sense in relation to purposes and environments. It doesn’t float freely, even if some of the tools it uses may be generic. This is why real-life intelligence is so varied, and so often an assembly or hybrid of multiple elements, fitted to ecological niches.
The autonomous vehicle is a good example. It uses multiple tools to sense, navigate and decide rather than a single AI, and it often requires adjustments for different environments. Everyday uses of AI in teams also illustrate the point. These usually mobilise multiple agents or tools to help them think, sometimes relying heavily on the technologies, sometimes putting them to one side.
Humans of the future may be equally hybrid. Many will have implants and prosthetics, living as part of networks of varying degrees of humanness, cyborgs for whom the boundaries of the human may be ever harder to define.
The key point is that we need to think in a biological way rather than a mechanistic way: how AI shapes humans and how humans shape AI will be more like an ecosystem or a jungle than a super machine, more like a forest in which there are predators, diseases and periodic fires as well as harmony, rather than a factory production line.
Too often we try to squeeze AI into anachronistic categories, asking: is it conscious, self-aware or creative, or should it have rights… ?
I suspect that few of these categories will turn out to be adequate to the task of making sense of life with super-intelligent machines. Nor will AI solve the problems of running a society in a neat new maths. Precisely because intelligence is so inseparable from life, and the life-wishes of entities as varied as wasps and bears, humans and machines, there is no conceivable calculus that could capture them let alone make them commensurate. Money is commensurable. Value is not. Machines can be aligned. Sentient beings cannot be…(More)”.
