What is AI?

There once was a time when if you had suggested that a computer could write a poem, or beat you at chess, or drive your car better than you, it would have been unimaginable.  It was a story for science fiction, or something you’d see in a film, but which most people agreed would never be possible.

Today all of those things are possible.  That went from unthinkable with most experts agreeing that it will never happen, to ~ is happening ~ within my lifetime.

The term General Artificial Intelligence refers to something more intelligent than humans.  In the year 2000 most experts believed that this was probably not achieveable.  So how far away is this next unimaginable thing?  No one really knows.  AI preachers say 2030, some people seem to think never, many others thing it must be somewhere in between. But now, more experts beleive it will happen than they did in 2000, and over 50% think it will happen within our lifetime.

What is Intelligence?

We have ChatGPT as an app now.  So hasn’t General AI already happened?  If it has it’s not really changed our life has it?  To understand what the hype is all about we need to first get into the weeds and start with making sure we know what we’re talking about when we talk about AI.

ChatGPT, Apple AI, Gemini, Copilot and the other AI tools out there are as artificial as any computer or computer code, it’s not human, so its artificial, that bit is true, but it is certainly not intelligent. It’s code. Its clever code, thats true, but so is the code behind Call of Duty, but its still code, its not intelligent.  We’ve had machine based code since Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, so the artificial machine aspect is nothing new.

By intelligence we think of something thats thinking for itself and working something out for itself.  Something that learns from experience or trial and error.  Ants learn where food is and communicate that to other ants.  Thats intelligence.  Orangutan’s learn from their mothers to be scared of snakes.  These are mecahnamisms developed in those animals to gain new knowledge over and above that which it was born with (programmed with in the DNA of its cells) which all help it reproduce and pass on its genes to a new generation.

So on the face of things, we have something artificial, but we don’t have something thats intelligent.  We just have great code and a new tool on our computer to use.

The Singularity

The excitement around AI comes from General Artificial Intelligence, this means something that is genuinely more intelligent than humans.  This is also called super intelligence or the singularity.  The singularity (in the AI field), the point at which AI is as clever as a human in all respects, when it can teach itself things, it can learn, more than the human creators over and above anything it has been coded with (in the DNA of its hardware) or has absorbed from human sources.

We’re currently in a place where computer software can already be better at humans in specific tasks. Chess and the Chinese strategy game Go are two examples, spreadsheets is another (Excel is just God like and will never be surpassed in the world of spreadsheets).  In the case of Go, there have been examples where the computer has not been coded to play Go, but instead was able to learn the rules itself, before becoming better at it than humans.

We also have computer hardware that is more capable than the human brain. We can calculate the average and maximum processing power of the brain and we have non-human storage, network power and computer chips that exceed that.

The dream for AI developers is to use this computing power to create intelligence that surpasses human intelligence in all ways. Reaching this point is the singularity. But that point has not yet been reached and it is unknown if it will ever be reached, and if it will, when. For now, we just have nice new software tools and one hell of a lot of hype.