Image by Hotpot.ai
by Dr. Jill Maschio
In an interview by Guyon Espiner with Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather” of AI, Hinton stated that humans are not special – we are no different than AI. You can go ahead and access the interview video below. With all respect, Mr. Hinton, here are 20 ways that humans are different than AI machines – ways that make us pretty unique. I am sure there are many more.
- Humans have a sense of Self and soul. They could be the same thing or two separate entities. It is believed that children around the ages of 5 or 6 become self-aware.
- Humans experience “real” emotions that motivate, drive, and influence learned cognition and behavior as a result of having them.
- Humans have thoughts that seem to appear out of nowhere at times (e.g., The Eureka effect).
- Humans have a heart and brain, and the two can “talk” to each other.
- Humans have a thalamus, which is like a relay switch in the brain that determines what information to process.
- Humans have a central nervous system and body naturally designed to survive (e.g., fight or flight response).
- Humans can act with free will.
- Humans have intuition.
- Human behavior is conditioned at times by learning through association.
- Humans have neurons that fire together with a first experience and then become more stable and strengthen when neural dendrites grow with continual firing.
- Humans develop personality through experiences and genetics.
- Humans experience natural evolutionary processes.
- Human behavior is driven partly by the unconscious mind.
- We can choose to improve our lives and well-being.
- The brain automatically selects what it chooses to process in the short-term memory/working memory before being consolidated into long-term memories based on the situation at the time, not based on an algorithm.
- Humans have free will.
- Humans can seek after purpose and meaning.
- Humans have made countless inventions – not only thought of the idea, but made the idea a reality (e.g., designed and made vehicles, trains, rockets, and flew to the moon, airplanes and flown them, submarines and navigated them, etc).
- Factors in the environment can “trigger” genes on and off, including the ways that genes are read and expressed (epigenetics). I think that makes humans pretty special.
- Humans have subjective experiences based on past and personal experiences because of knowing what it feels like and are self-aware (rather than simply stating “I had a subjective experience like AI can”).
- Comprehension. Humans can comprehend information and experiences by forming meaning. This is different than AI that is designed to predict the next word.
Humans “no longer needed” – Godfather of AI | 30 with Guyon Espiner S3 Ep 9 | RNZ
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