What Is Intelligence? summary

At a very basic level, intelligence is all about survival. If we zoom way, way in and observe a lone bacterium drifting through its liquid world, we can see the core of intelligence forming. Not the kind we usually picture – with neurons firing or thoughts bubbling up – but a minimal, stripped-down version whose only real job is to keep the cell alive from one moment to the next.

Life can’t just replicate blindly. It needs a way to build itself, maintain itself, and do all of that inside a real environment that never stays still. That messiness changes everything. It means a living system needs a boundary – a membrane – to protect its delicate chemistry. But the boundary can’t be sealed shut, because energy and matter have to flow in and out in order to survive.

Let’s fast forward to the turn of the eighteenth century, when one of the stars of the Enlightenment era, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, helped usher in the age of the mechanical calculator.

Leibniz was one of the first people to see broader, loftier uses for calculations. He dreamed of an algorithm that could give a true or false answer to any statement – a day when philosophers would settle debates the way accountants balance ledgers.

So how did the early, wobbly steps of cybernetics lead to modern AI advancements? While we can’t get into every detail, we have to mention the perceptron. The perceptron is the simplest kind of artificial neuron, the kind you can bundle together, feed a ton of photos, and ask it to recognize something like bananas. 

But the real ability for a machine to learn, through trial-and-error, how to identify a banana, is computation. The computation is what allows the machine to learn – for the neuron to fire in a positive way when it makes the right decisions. This is known as an activation function, and one of the most commonly used is called ReLU, short for Rectified Linear Unit.

Before we wrap this Blink up, let’s get into the one area of AI that most of us have some familiarity with: language models.

Products like ChatGPT were seen as quite the breakthrough, but let’s knock language off its pedestal a little bit. Sure, humans use it at a very sophisticated level, but plenty of animals communicate richly – dolphins, whales, parrots, even prairie dogs have surprisingly detailed alarm calls. What’s ultimately important about language is what it does: it lets minds reveal themselves to each other. It’s basically a social compression system. Your brain takes this huge, messy, sensory-soaked inner world and squeezes it into a compact code that someone else can make sense of. Sometimes that code is a yelp of pain; sometimes it’s Hamlet.

Let’s close things out by looking at what the future might hold for artificial intelligence. 

Right now, AI isn’t exactly at the same level of human intelligence, but it is actually quite close to the kind of intelligence we see in other lifeforms.