Musings of a restless mind
Disclaimer: This is not a post about artificial intelligence... but it kind of is ;)
It's hard to read any tech-related article these days, without seeing in print, the well flogged and frankly overused buzzword (or phrase), “Artificial Intelligence” … AI for short.
There. I did it too.
I didn't even get past the first paragraph.
Did I hear you say epic fail? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. ;)
Okay, I've had my fun….
INTELLIGENCE
What is it?
Is it wholly qualitative?
Is it possible to wholly quantify?
Why do we care?
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Let's start with the "what".
Before we attempt to define, build, apply artificial intelligence, strip away the first word. What does it truly mean on its own?
This is the part where the blogger quotes Merriam-Webster, OED or some other fancy dictionary.
I prefer to take the non-scientific and modern approach here and quote Wikipedia. Simply because it's definition is one of the most apt I came across in all of my 5 minutes of research.
According to Wikipedia, Intelligence has been defined in many ways to include the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, and problem solving.
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The above definition hints at quite a few intrinsic factors.
Is intelligence qualitative? Yes.
Wholly? No.
Some parts of intelligence are clearly more qualitative than quantitative.
Creativity and emotional intelligence fall into this category.
Self-awareness could possibly be lumped in here as well.
They are all fairly difficult to measure.
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One’s ability to think or demonstrate the capacity to think logically, solve several types of problems, plan, and understand what they learn are more quantifiable traits of intelligence.
The former traits are much more difficult to quantify.
It is very difficult to say a classically trained pianist is more creative that a digital artist by a factor of say 10 or 15.
The intelligence quotient or IQ for short on the other hand, attempts to standardize methods for measuring and determining the latter traits or characteristics of intelligence.
The term was made popular by German psychologist and philosopher William Stern (born Ludwig Wilhelm Stern) in a publication in 1912.
It attempts to rank most humans “intelligence” on a normalised scale. The majority of people or the population average will usually be a score close to 100.
95% percent of the world population tends to score somewhere on the order of 2 standard deviations from the mean, either side of 100. (That's 95% of humans with an IQ ranging anywhere between 70 to 130.
95% percent of the world population tends to score somewhere on the order of 2 standard deviations from the mean, either side of 100. (That's 95% of humans with an IQ ranging anywhere between 70 to 130.
Albert Einstein (in comparison) is said to have had an IQ somewhere on the order of 160!
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PS: Don't envy anyone on the far right of the spectrum. It's actually a painful existence. Google the words "Tortured genius" and go down that internet rabbit-hole.... after you finish reading this post. :)
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| NOT Albert Einstein |
PS: Don't envy anyone on the far right of the spectrum. It's actually a painful existence. Google the words "Tortured genius" and go down that internet rabbit-hole.... after you finish reading this post. :)
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Most IQ tests though tend to focus more or less on one or a few of the more measurable sides of the latter traits and hence, results can be skewed.
A good example would be a test I recently took (today actually) which was composed of 20 questions which mostly were of the sort you would see in basic psychometric tests where one has to figure out patterns in an array of shapes and colours, arrange in series or matrices and deduce the missing shape in the pattern(s).
There were also a few number series type questions where one has to compute the patterns and figure out which is the next number in the series, or even more tricky, which is the rogue number that was deliberately included to throw you off track.
I scored a decent 127.
I don't care that much.
IQ tests are subjective and have been known to give widely varying results.
To prove my point, I did another (entirely different test) 20 minutes later. (& for some reason got significantly bored with it halfway through).
I scored 9 points better! Surely I didn't get smarter in 20 minutes did I?
You get the gist of it.
Intelligence is somewhat measurable, but not exact.
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Any good scientist or analyst worth their mettle would at this point admonish me… “2 data points does not a sample size make”.
Yes, I know.
Forgive my laissez-faire attitude to science on this one occasion. I only did it to prove a point.
In fact, writing this blog post came as an afterthought.
I ramble.
Anyway, why do we care?
- Survival
- Leadership
- Finding a mate
- Inventions
- Success in life / career
- Creativity and the joys of the creative arts
- …
- ...
- (fill in the blanks, I get bored easily)
- …
- …
- (keep filling in the blanks)
- …
- Evolution
- …
- Super intelligent killer robots & the AI revolution
- ….
- Bio-hacking and the super human “Homo Deus"
- …
- Obviate the singularity and don't get killed by the robots
- ...
You're smart.
You get the point.
I added the first few points in all seriousness, the last few as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek paradoxical act.
I kept to my word. Sort of.
This has not been an article on AI.
(Clearly one of my favourite subjects to talk about)!
(Clearly one of my favourite subjects to talk about)!
Intelligence is key for the sustained survival of the human race.
Intelligence as we know it today will continue to evolve as we are.
As we try to mimic human intelligence in machines, let's be sure we actually know what it is and understand all the ramifications of our actions before we (the human race) begin to find ourselves on the wrong side of the bell-curve as compared to the intelligent of the "artificial" kind.
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| Human IQ Normal Distributions by % of population. Source: Hand in Home Homeschool |
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P.E II
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NB: If you want to have some fun with this, feel free to take the test I took.
Link here: http://www.free-iqtest.net/
Obviously, this is the link to the 2nd one I scored higher on ;)
Post your score in the comments. Take multiple ones if you want. It would be fun to see how much people's scores vary when they take the 2nd test and let me know what you think.
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NB: If you want to have some fun with this, feel free to take the test I took.
Link here: http://www.free-iqtest.net/
Obviously, this is the link to the 2nd one I scored higher on ;)
Post your score in the comments. Take multiple ones if you want. It would be fun to see how much people's scores vary when they take the 2nd test and let me know what you think.
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