The year 2511, 500 years from now. Reckon we’ll still be alive? I’m going to be writing envisaging what someone like me would think looking back at the time we are living in today. I had the idea to write this article a while ago but I was reminded of the topic recently over a story published on the BBC News website. The title was something along the lines of ‘Scientists predict a limit to the extent of human intelligence’. The main thrust of the story was that scientists had predicted a kind of intelligence plateau, a limit to the extent our brain can understand the world around us. I don’t know whether to find this incredibly depressing or enlightening. Wouldn’t it be depressing if our brain limited us from continually expanding and researching into the many grey areas of science that we still don’t fully understand? Or is it enlightening in the idea that reaching this intelligence plateau would lead us to some sort of monumental consciousness raising event where we would finally conquer the previous questions of our existence all together. Maybe the plateau is so high that by the time we have reached it they will be nothing else to know or that needs explaining, a scary thought, for me at least.
I was naturally sceptical of this story from the moment I read the headline. If this sort of intelligence plateau does exist then wouldn’t there be ways around it? Firstly if scientists themselves have predicted this sort of event happening and know what it will consist of then they will surely be able to work around it? Surely if they can identify this plateau then they will be able to recognise the sorts of ways in which we could work around it. Or maybe I’m just being naive.
This idea of a limit to human’s intelligence fits in quite nicely with the principal of singularity. This is the idea that one day the AI, (Artificial Intelligence), that we have created will reach the same level of intelligence as us, or even surpass our levels of intelligence. Is this not another way of crossing this barrier? If we can create intelligent machines that learn from the environment around them and are able to advance their own intelligence without consistent human intervention, will these superior machines, not limited by the supposed constraints of the human brain, be able to relay information back for humans to decipher? Would this thus give humans information from beyond the pale and therefore possibly advancing ourselves beyond this barrier?
A thing that worried me about this story was the ammunition it could provide for theists. Doesn’t it sound like perfect evidence to back up the God Hypothesis? If there is a limit to human intelligence then surely that is what God has designed us to be like. He/She/It has put a ceiling on the human mind. I imagine anti-evolutionists would also go along this route. ‘Surely if we are always evolving then there should be no limits to our intelligence?’ I imagine they would argue that the something beyond this plateau would be an almighty God figure who would no doubt be capable of designing humans and putting a limit to their natural curiosity.
Nice blog Dan, was particularly intrigued by the notion that AI could potentially surpass our own levels of intelligence. I don't know too much about this sort of thing and perhaps you could direct me to somewhere I could find out more but my 1st reaction was, machines might be created in such a way that makes their responses far superior to our own, thus creating a false illusion that they are more intelligent than ourselves however, in essence it is just a manufactured level of sensitivity that cannot access genuine intuitive ideas.
ReplyDeleteThat might sounds like jibberish, sorry if so but just something to think about really.
Interesting point about why, if evolution happens, we would ever reach a pinnacle or plateau.
ReplyDeleteYeah the whole singularity principle thing is cool but scary. There was an article on time.com and I'll see if I can track it down which talked all about it in a lot of depth. In that article they were predicting that AI could match humans as early as 2050. The wierd thing is machines can do stupidly complex calculations and run mind bending programs which us mere humans find impossible without the aid of machines, but when it comes to simple things like emotion and morals AI is completely lost at sea. Going to be wierd when the first gen of emotional machines hit the Market.
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