The complexity of human intelligence is that it can be downright foolish. The intelligence that separates ours from other species. While the intelligence in most other creatures is limited to mere instinct for survival, human intelligence has developed the sophistication to think about the future not just of the self and community but of the planet and the universe. As a matter of fact, humans think about the future and also about the beginning of time. Humans have the ability for imagination and invention. So advanced is our intelligence that we have now manufactured a non-natural intelligence so powerful that it is threatening human intelligence itself. Ironically, it may be foolish to create something that would threaten humanity. But, then this is not the first time humans have utilised human intelligence to invent something that could potentially destroy humanity – making intelligence the complex topic that it is.
Psychologist Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind broke down human intelligence into 7 spheres, proposing that human intelligence can not be captured by a single measure. Gardner suggests that the intelligence of our species is a combination in varying degrees of linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. The concept of social and emotional intelligence was later introduced in 1990 by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, its key superiority over all kinds of natural human intelligence for now, seems to be speed. What would take one or a team of humans hours, weeks or years, AI takes a few seconds or minutes. Speed is a concept that fascinates humans. As soon as we master a skill, we want to see how fast we can do it. Sports championships are mostly all about speed after it is about skill. Business success depends on speed. How best and how fast we can deliver a product or a service. Quality trumps everything, but nothing compares to quality delivered fast. In fact in the business world, I see more people compromising on quality for speed. Humans know the value of patience but seldom apply it in the workings of the world. No wonder then, that humans have created an intelligence that can deliver information and analysis at a speed impossible to match by human capability. This is nudging a redefinition of intelligence itself.
We are now being forced to rewire how and for what we use our brains to thrive in the job market. As long as humans were dealing with humans there was the leverage of human motivations and barriers. A leverage that made us demand unrealistic quality output no matter the nature of the input and even extracted it by preying on human insecurities and obligations. Artificial intelligence on the other hand only operates on mechanical clarity. It will deliver in what seems like super-sonic speed but it relies on clear and detailed prompts broken down with as many examples as possible. If a human service provider asked this much from their clients they often risked being labeled as unintelligent or worse, lazy to use their own brains and expected to deliver anyway.
Artificial intelligence in due course will perhaps change the way we look at intelligence on the whole. As we discern human intelligence from machine intelligence, anything sans empathy and emotional understanding and a respect for fellow humans may not be considered intelligent at all. Would this in turn make humanity a kinder race? The answer, as Bob Dylan famously sang, is blowing in the wind. It is not just artificial intelligence that we feel threatened by, it is change in general. When machines first made their entry and started to replace manual labor, there were similar concerns which carried on for at least a generation of skilled craftsmen. But today, we sit back and reap the benefits of machines in every walk of life. Going by this pattern, one scenario would be that in less than a generation we will not be able to imagine a life without AI to augment what we do.
The growing sophistication of non-human intelligence will perhaps further fine-tune spheres of human intelligence to isolate it from machine intelligence. Human success in the work-force may get heavily indexed on the intelligence for empathy, kindness, understanding humane-ness more than anything else. In a bygone era, we were obsessed with what separates us from monkeys. In the future, it may all be about what separates us from machines.
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