Intelligence Swinging Between Artificial And Natural.

From the Silicon Valley to the rest of the world, it's more and more about "intelligence." No matter what we exactly refer to: AI is the buzz, Intelligence is the bug, tout court! Understanding is a must and an emergence more than ever.

Besides, an ever increasing series of phobias, exponentially multiplied by a powerful misleading info-machine, keeps on creating our psychological war-zone with tons of daily rising questions like: Will intelligent robots take over our jobs? Will they make our life better on this planet, and why and how? And what is the deal in reducing ourselves more and more to a machine? By the way, isn't the invasion already among us? While major nations are preoccupied how to handle human migrations, aren't robots and all their pendant of automation technology the real uncontrolled international immigration flows to manage? Even Elon Musk, didn't he recently show some serious preoccupations about the urgency of creating the most adequate regulation (lawmakers should focus on) about this potential disrupting innovation? Not to mention the idea of an AI like God, which is more and more growing according to Vince Lynch, Ceo at IV.AI.

That said, still, what about our emotions, our feelings, our perceptions? Or to use a Latin word, which eventually would better define the topic about "intelligence between artificial and natural": what about our "qualia", which relates to consciousness and awareness? Quickly summarizing, these could be some of the main issues, physicist and computer scientist, Federico Faggin (inventor of the MOS Silicon Gate Technology, which allowed him to design the world's first series of microprocessors at Intel; and also father of the world's first touchscreen technology) discussed last week with mathematician Edward Frenkel (currently professor at UC Berkeley, and formerly on the faculty at Harvard University) on the occasion of the annual SAND, aka Science and Non-Duality Conference, organized by Zania & Maurizio Benazzo.

SAND17 - The Emergent Universe was a 5-day immersive experience where leading scientists, philosophers and spiritual teachers gathered "to explore a new understanding of who we really are, both as individuals and as a society, as humanity, as cosmos from the perspective of emergence."

Faggin reassured the audience saying that: "there is no Singularity. We won't get any conscious computer." He too had this idea in the past when: "it was more tech than thinking." Till one day when he got his enlightenment perceiving that: "I was the world. The world was me. We were one. One perception, and it was love." Basically, what no computer can never feel.

Frenkel on his side agreed with Faggin, encouraging to expand the conversation with people like Elon Musk, since he has been more and more critical of inventors who are only-tech driven to create a "super-intelligence" to scale-up money, forgetting about the humans. Also he highlighted how even Ray Kurzweil (major Singularity theoretician and futurologist at Google), recently speaking of "human uploads", was referring to the possibility to better connect his consciousness with his father's one. It sounded kinda solving some family issues. In other words, it looks like not even the most powerful technology can still get rid of all that Freud-mess personas about father-and-son.

Anyways, sticking to the semantics which our words bring and share as symbols, would you prefer food with "artificial" flavors or with "natural" ingredients? Speaking of which, let's not forget there is still more intelligence and emotion (awareness and consciousness) in a leaf of basil moving by itself to let the sun caress it, rather than in the most super-intelligent computer till now created, because as Faggin once well said: "Only darkness inside a computer, no light."