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MZANSI’S AI MANUAL

INTELLIGENCE – HUMAN OR ARTIFICIAL?

There is a lot of fuss about Artificial Intelligence. My focus has always been the aptitude and morals of Humans. If we are creating AI to emulate people we should be a little apprehensive about it. This is a 13 page, all you need to know, easy to read AI manual for the people of South Africa.

The beginning of AI.

Artificial Intelligence was first imagined by a human way back in 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It was there that Mr John McCarthy first used the term. Also in attendance was Allen Newell and Mr Herbert A Simon who presented their ‘Logic Theorist’: a computer program able to process mathematical theorems. This is believed to have been the first AI ever.

Years passed and AI captured people’s attention when IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’ (a primitive type of supercomputer) defeated the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Side Nugget: Dr Seuss (the creator of Cat in the Hat) use to go to Dartmouth College.

Some people’s uneasiness with AI is not that it can beat us at board games but that it will destroy humanity in its entirety. Is that a bit of a melodramatic concern? Our very own South African innovation champion Elon Musk said AI could endanger the existence of human civilisation, but that didn’t stop him implanting the first Neuralink chip into a human brain this year.

Many educated (and ignorant) people have shared similar sentiments and one example (of many) I can give is an online petition signed by over thirty thousand people to ‘pause’ AI innovation until investigations into risk could be completed. See: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/. People can protest all they like, but innovation cannot be paused.

Humans are the only species that have invented something that can totally destroy themselves, and we first perfected this back in 1945 with the atomic bomb. AI can decide on a target and pull its own trigger, which sets it apart from an bomb. Sun Tzu would agree we learn a little more about AI.

As a concept AI is a digital program that is able to perform new tasks without instruction of any sort. AI ‘intelligence’ is the act of ‘deciding’ on an action that will have a positive (desired or more efficient) outcome to a new situation without guidance.

People like to compare AI with our brains. I study psychology and the human noggin. We humans believe we are the supreme natural organic intelligence and the benchmark for AI would therefore be our own brains capabilities.

 Side Nugget: Did you know that the two genes involved in determining the size of our brains have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60 000 years or so? Our ‘CPUs’ (brains) are undergoing rapid evolution and who knows what we will be capable of in a few thousand years’ time.

We enjoy imagining AI to be a robot or humanoid, but AI and robots are not mutually exclusive because you can have AI without a physical form (AI can exist in a ‘cloud’ of servers), but you cannot have an intelligent robot without AI. So what then does the AI family portrait really look like? Let me introduce you to some of them.

You may also download a PDF of the AI Manual by clicking here.