Futurist: Chasing Intelligence (or am I chasing my tail?)

As I consider the misnomer artificial intelligence, I think we should call it machine intelligence. It's human-designed, human data, and, for the most part, today, human outputs. So, it isn't truly artificial. It's only artificial if you take the human-centric view that the only thinking machines on the planet are humans. A note here: we don't call houses artificial caves. they are effectively artificial caves (and sometimes we are lucky enough to have a man cave in the basement)! There are likely other species that also have thoughts. My favorite thinking species outside of humanity is our best friends. While dogs are not at the human level of intelligence, I suspect you will never see a dog sitting and reading a book. What is probably not true is that someday, dogs will be smart enough to sit and read books. But right now, you don't see dogs in easy chairs consuming the works of Tolstoy. Although knowing my dog, he wouldn't read Tolstoy. But this does lead me to my topic for today: intelligence.

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Let's talk about what intelligence is. There are many definitions of the concept of intelligence. For example, people often associate those who are quickwitted with being intelligent. I agree, and I recall that language or communication intelligence is important. But some people are empathic and reach human emotion. I consider them emotionally intelligent. By the way, Both of those terms are terms that professionals often use to describe human beings. There is, however, another kind of intelligence. I am referring to the ability to take known and unknown information and bring them together to postulate a yet unknown solution. So, those are the three types of intelligence you look for. The last one is the easiest to test for. Because you look for people who can solve problems, they don't have to solve problems correctly. They have to have a framework where they take a problem and say oh yeah, I have an idea. Here's a possible solution.

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Bringing this concept of intelligence back to what is commonly called artificial intelligence or AI, I call machine intelligence; we see that machine intelligence can easily assist with the last one. Today, emotional intelligence has been much harder to develop into a machine intelligence delivery. That is more because a component of empathy is feeling the pain of the other person. Empty will come over time. The reality is now, however, that Machine Intelligence can help us. It can quickly answer fact-based questions for us. In the future, I see even more potential in responding with empathy.

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Let's go back to my dog. My dog sits in the living room reading the book "Why does your human spend so much time on computers? A Dog's Handbook to training humans. Dogs tend more towards emotional intelligence. What I mean by this is that dogs pay attention to their humans and attempt to align with their emotional responses to various things. If you're scared, your dog will bark. If you are happy, your dog will sit beside you to share that happiness. If you're sad, your dog comes and sits in front of you and connects or communes with you. The dog seems to say, "I am sharing that sadness." Today, I wouldn't go to machine intelligence when I was sad. I would if it was a situation where I was sad because of a problem. I would go to machine intelligence to help me solve this problem.

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There is another side to the concept of emotional intelligence. It is understanding the situation and the needs of the person you speak with. Sometimes, it is just that the person needs you to hear them. Many social scientists have studied the human need for others to "hear them." Social scientists practice active listening, which is when a person listens and provides affirmations to the speaker. That affirmation gives the person speaking the feeling of connection. This capability is coming and likely only slightly beyond 12-18 months. What will the impact of that be?

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I talked in several columns about the concept of human augmentation. Machine intelligence augmenting human beings. Growing up, I struggled with the memorization required to use English correctly. I won't blame the reality of how my early exposure to French, Spanish, and Thai impacted me. Spanish, French, and Thai are logical languages. Their punctuation and structure are simple. The language is very complex, but the reality is that the structure of the language is not. Bob caused me to struggle with English, but it didn't make my learning of English easier. Machine intelligence provides me with tools that help me communicate more effectively. I don't use AI to write these columns, but I check punctuation, spelling, and grammar before publishing using AI. That increases my effective communication skills by allowing me to follow most English schools.

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So, as we head down this path, machine intelligence leads us towards it. Or we are leading machine intelligence since we deal with it occasionally, helping people to stop and look around. Think about all the ways machine intelligence could make your life easier. Look for the positive in the path forward. Imagine having a pocket assistant that could help you read the emotional responses of human beings. Utilize the grammar and spelling checker systems that allow you to communicate more effectively. And when looking at problems honestly, you can think of 30 questions to help you solve the problem. Ask the machine intelligence systems the questions you have. In the future, the number of personal assistants will increase. That capability is coming in the next two years. I've discussed many capabilities that will bring you to the rest of us. But the one that will be the most important is helping us become better problem solvers.