Machine intelligence

Edge.org has an annual question to which 190 people are invited
to respond. This year it is "What do you think of machines
that think?" and the answer I gave is below:

 

What I think about machines that think is that we are all
missing the point still. The true transforming genius of human
intelligence is not individual thinking at all but collective,
collaborative and distributed intelligence—the fact that (as
Leonard Reed pointed out) it takes thousands of different people to
make a pencil, not one of whom knows how to make a pencil. What
transformed the human race into a world-dominating technium was not
some change in human heads, but a change between them: the
invention of exchange and specialisation. It was a network
effect.

We really have no idea what dolphins or octopi or crows could
achieve if their brains were networked in the same way. Conversely,
if human beings had remained largely autonomous individuals they
would have remained rare hunter-gatherers at the mercy of their
environments as the huge-brained Neanderthals indeed did right to
the end. What transformed human intelligence was the connecting up
of human brains into networks by the magic of division of labour, a
feat first achieved on a small scale in Africa from around 300,000
years ago and then with gathering speed in the last few thousand
years.

That is why the AI achievements of computers were
disappointingly limited when they were single machines, but as soon
as the Internet came along remarkable things began to happen. The
place that machine intelligence will make the most difference is
among the machines, not within the machines. It's already clear
that the Internet is the true machine intelligence. In the future,
network phenomena like block-chains, the technology behind
crypto-currencies, may be the route to the most radical examples of
machine intelligence.