I have been reading articles by philosophers and thinkers for several months stating how “unintelligent” Artificial Intelligence is, highlighting its limitations, but without demonstrating it empirically. Statements that may have seemed valid two or three years ago but are no longer valid. Obsolete discourses and naive opinions that do not help us understand the moment we are living in and, on the contrary, lead to confusion.
All this to glorify the human species. Partly due to lack of knowledge, but mainly due to fear, fear of being displaced, fear of uncertainty, fear of change, fear of losing a way of life, of losing a job. Legitimate fear, but not a justified fear.
Articles that are aimed at those readers who do not want to believe that Artificial Intelligence has already surpassed milestones that were thought unattainable, only to fall into complacency that the human being is a “being” with “magical” and irreplicable characteristics, which They differ from machines and from the rest of the animal species. But those cognitive abilities that were believed to be exclusive to humans, such as reasoning or creativity, have already been acquired by machines and this is only the beginning.
We enter a new era. Let's face it, try to understand it and try to ride this wave because sooner or later we are going to have to live with it.
Instead of wondering if this new paradigm will exist, let's accept that it already exists and start making decisions about what we want this coexistence with this new type of intelligence to be like.
Claims like AI can process a lot of data, but it can't reason, doesn't understand context, isn't creative, or isn't intelligent don't hold up when we start defining those properties. According to the RAE, Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Reasoning is ordering and relating ideas to reach a conclusion, or creativity is the ability to create. All of them are definitions that can be applied to what a human brain or a digital brain is capable of doing today.
I personally find it difficult to think that an AI does not reason when it is capable of understanding a joke that I have made up, I write it to it, I ask it why it is funny and it surprisingly explains it to me. It's hard for me to think that he doesn't understand the context when I can show him a suspense novel with all its clues, ask him who the murderer is, and he's able to deduce it. It is difficult for me to think that he does not understand when I show him a humorous illustration that he has never seen and he explains to me the reason for the irony.
But it's not just understanding and reasoning, it's also creativity. AI is already capable of creating entirely new poems, metaphors and images. What's more, just yesterday, OpenAI surprised us with Sora, which generates videos and scenes as if they were a movie but that have never existed.
Once it is admitted that a machine is intelligent, the next statement or denial is usually the following: “But it does it differently than a human, AI is not as intelligent”, “the machine has not understood it like a human does”.
It sounds pretentious to say it makes it different when we don't even know how the human brain works. If we knew it we would be solving one of the most important mysteries in the history of science, the mystery of mental life. Without a doubt worthy of the Nobel Prize.
In any case, it would not alter being able to affirm that an AI reasons, is creative or is intelligent since all these definitions are based on the result and not on the way to reach it.
In this sense, throughout the history of humanity, we have been inspired by our environment and many times by “biological elements”. But, even if we did not know the physical laws behind these elements, we have focused on the result and not on the process to reach it.
We have been inspired by birds when we wanted to fly and we have managed to make airplanes capable of flying faster and further than any bird. But we haven't built airplanes that flap their wings.
The same goes for the car. To achieve the solution we have not created a mechanical horse to pull the cart. But we have managed to build cars that can go faster and further than horse-drawn carts.
The same thing happens with Artificial Intelligence. Machines are capable of imitating the result and in many cases surpassing the human brain, but perhaps not the way to achieve it.
Machines start to think. Let's not hide our heads like an ostrich. Let's get out of those nostalgic positions of a time long gone. Let's be brave and stop trying to protect human beings by attributing exclusive properties to them. Let's stop undervaluing AI, let's admit that it has already arrived, let's interpret this historical moment and put our efforts into encouraging the best scenarios to occur and avoid the dystopian ones.
www.notak.ai.w
Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria is a serial entrepreneur and reference in the Artificial Intelligence and privacy sector. He is the founder and CEO of the leading Artificial Intelligence company Sherpa.ai.