Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

by Melanie Mitchell

Hofstadter’s terror was in response to something entirely different. It was not about AI becoming too smart, too invasive, too malicious, or even too useful. Instead, he was terrified that intelligence, creativity, emotions, and maybe even consciousness itself would be too easy to produce – that what he valued most in humanity would end up being nothing more than a ‘bag of tricks’, that a superficial set of brute-force algorithms could explain the human spirit.

complexity. He fears that AI might show us that the human qualities we most value are disappointingly simple to mechanize. As Hofstadter explained to me after the meeting, here referring to Chopin, Bach, and other paragons of humanity, ‘If such minds of infinite subtlety and complexity and emotional depth could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy my sense of what humanity is about.’

In a recent report on the current state of AI, a committee of prominent researchers defined the field as ‘a branch of computer science that studies the properties of intelligence by synthesizing intelligence’.

A better name might have been interior unit. Think of the structure of your brain, in which some neurons directly control ‘outputs’ such as your muscle movements but most neurons simply communicate with other neurons. These could be called the brain’s hidden neurons.

‘A pile of narrow intelligences will never add up to a general intelligence. General intelligence isn’t about the number of abilities, but about the integration between those abilities.’

Kurzweil’s thinking has been particularly influential in the tech industry, where people often believe in exponential technological progress as the means to solve all of society’s problems.