On Intelligence summary

Have you ever wondered why you’re capable of perceiving the world around you? Or how the sights and sounds and tastes that you sense are turned into the fluid experience of your surroundings?

This is, in fact, the result of a complicated process taking place in your brain, where the sensory information that comes in is combined with your existing memories.

When you turn the key in the ignition of your car, what do you think will happen? Well, that’s a no-brainer – the engine starts up. But how did you know that? What makes us capable of predicting future events?

Basically, it’s due to the way memories are connected in our brain, which consists of many regions, each of which stores different kinds of memories.

Scientists know now that they can’t create truly intelligent machines by building traditional computers – the so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach. Once they realized this, they started to explore another option: developing neural networks, i.e., machines based on the model of the human brain, where information travels along pathways of artificial neurons.

Unlike in a computer, there is no central storage unit in a brain: memory and knowledge are stored throughout the brain as a vast network of neurons. This is the architecture neural networks seek to emulate.

So how far away are we from designing intelligent machines? To be honest, pretty far – but not quite as far as you might think!

The first obstacle to overcome is providing the machines with at least the same memory capacity as the human brain. In order to simulate the brain’s synapses, the machine would require roughly eight trillion bytes of memory. A computer today has around 100 billion bytes, so this would need to be increased eightyfold.

Anyone familiar with science fiction novels or movies probably knows this scenario: machines attain self-awareness and turn against humanity. Happily, such horrors can only exist in fiction, and the intelligent machines of the future have little in common with such imaginary killer robots.

In fact, the worry that intelligent machines might feel their “slave” status under humans is unfair and so revolt in order to exterminate humanity is based on a false analogy. Since their intelligence would be based on the brain’s neocortex, intelligent machines will not automatically become capable of emotions and feelings. Human emotions, such as fear, desire, love and hate, aren’t generated there, but in an older, more primitive part of the brain. As long as the latter part of the brain is not emulated by the machines, they will not be human-like in this respect, but useful, unemotional tools.