Monthly Archives: September 2015

Quality Intelligence – Machines that can Predict the Future

Intelligence

The notion of quality intelligence, unlike speed intelligence, is difficult to define in measurable terms. It can best be described by example. Consider the case where the ability of one person to perform a certain task is clearly superior to another. For example, one person may be good at math while another just doesn’t “get it”. One person may have a natural ability to learn to play a musical instrument with ease while another finds learning the same instrument an exercise in frustration. One person may be good at recognizing patterns, such as constellations in the sky, whereas another has difficulty seeing them. In these examples the issue isn’t how fast one performs the task, it isn’t a matter of speed intelligence. It also isn’t a matter of how much information we can process or how much we know, it isn’t a matter of collective intelligence. This intelligence requires a specific kind or aspect of intelligence, it requires the ability to think or to process information in a way which is specific to a particular task. The need for developing very specific cognitive skills is often what differentiates one individual from another, especially in highly skilled areas. Mastery of advanced skills require a particular and often unique approach. We often hear people talk about the ability to “see” a problem in a specific way. It is one of the key characteristics which differentiates top performers in science, business, or the arts.

So far we have only considered abilities and domains that are well known to us. But what about abilities that are unknown to us because they are out of our reach? Nick Bostrom suggests “… the idea of possible but non-realized cognitive talents, talents that no actual human possesses…”. What these abilities might be we can only guess. Might a person or other entity be able to foresee the future? Not by literally being able to see the future, but by observing the obvious consequences of the present, not evident to the comparatively less intelligent population around them. While predicting the future may sound like any one of many films that come out of Hollywood, we have readily come to accept that we can now predict the weather with a fair amount of accuracy, at least for a few days. As our ability to understand the systems that manifest themselves as wind and rain, hot and cold, we have learned to “see” tomorrow’s weather before it happens. In medicine, we are constantly striving to understand the system of human physiology and the malfunctions that we know generally as “disease”. As physicians, chemists, and other scientists increase their collective intelligence, it in many cases increases their quality intelligence. While the knowledge that arises out of collective intelligence may be necessary to discover the cause and ultimately the cure for a particular malady, it is not necessarily sufficient. For that leap in advancement, we need quality intelligence. We need to be able to “see” a complex system of biology, the human body, and its interaction with another complex system, the environment, in a particular way. It is this “seeing” that leads to an abstract concept we call “understanding”.  It is this understanding that allows us to see that a person is becoming ill before they show symptoms.

As humans and machines become more knowledgeable, more intelligent, and more powerful, the ability to “see” events before they happen will become more and more prevalent. In a competitive environment, the individual who is better at seeing what will happen next has a distinct advantage over everyone else. In the future, whoever can see more clearly into the future will be ahead of the rest of the pack. That individual will be one of the top people….or one of the top machines.

Collective Intelligence

Intelligence, Robots

Nick Bostrom has described collective intelligence as “joint problem‐solving capacity”. There are many examples of problems that have been solved by more than a single individual and which probably could not have been solved by a single person. When a new drug is discovered and developed it is not done by a single person but by a team of people working toward a collective goal, sometimes in collaboration with other teams performing similar, related research. Projects such as the Human Genome Project was a massive research project that was only able to achieve its goal by the collective research of twenty teams across six countries over thirteen years. In our daily lives we often tackle jobs at work that require the cooperation of several people or large teams to solve problems and implement solutions. We are surrounded by evidence that our problem-solving potential is increased by combining the skills of multiple individuals. This increase in potential is realized for two reasons.

First, we have an additive effect. Think of a simple example where our goal is to identify all red objects in a warehouse. A single individual may be able to pick out and identify each object in 1 second. Therefore they can sort through 60 objects per minute, 3600 objects in an hour. But if we can enlist ten people to take on this task, assuming they are all able to sort through objects at the same rate, we can sort through 36,000 in an hour. In other words, we can accomplish the task ten times as fast! This is of course a rather simple uninteresting example, but this is the way many tasks are accomplished. The pyramids of Egypt were built this way, and many intellectual tasks are as well.

The second reason we can accomplish difficult tasks more easily with a group is due to the breadth of skills required to complete the task. We live in an increasingly complex world and the problems we are faced with are constantly increasing in complexity as well. As the tasks become more complex, solving them requires an ever-increasing array of problem-solving skills. While this phenomenon has been evolving for a long time, the first good example with a significant impact is found in Henry Ford’s approach to building the automobile. Rather than relying on a single individual or even a few individuals with the requisite skills to build a car, he broke the overall tasks into smaller tasks requiring a degree of skill that could be developed in the workers in a short amount of time. Today we see an even greater divergence of skills required in our world. Think of the number of people that contribute to the treatment of a patient during their stay at a hospital. Even going to a store to buy something sometimes involves several people. We ask where we can find what we are looking for and are directed to the correct department. Once there we can’t find what we are looking for and have to ask someone who works in that department. We then ask them about some feature of the product, they don’t know the answer and go find someone who knows more about that product. Finally, we go to the register where we pay for what we have selected. While this may not seem like something that exemplifies the height of human intelligence, it demonstrates how much of what we undertake relies on the knowledge of multiple individuals. This is a simple form of collective intelligence.

There is one more aspect of collective intelligence that is important to recognize. In the past we see examples of a brilliant individual such as Thomas Edison or Alexander Bell who were great innovators. But even these great names relied on the discoveries and knowledge gained from others, some their contemporaries and some from the past. More than any other species, humans have the ability to learn from their predecessors. This ability is referred to by Michael Tomasello and Steven Mithen as cultural learning. In its simplest form it can be seen as a child learning not to cross the street without looking for oncoming cars. It can be seen as the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic that we learn in our first few years of school. It is seen in our education where we learn the necessary skills for our careers. Although we don’t often think of it, when we attend a year of school to learn a trade or skill we are learning skills and knowledge that took hundreds of years to accumulate. The long term effect of this type of knowledge transfer is incredible. It is what has allowed us to develop rocket ships that fly to the moon and understand the complex system we know as the human body. It is what has led to the development of  the computers that are so advanced, so fast, so intelligent – that they may soon surpass us in intelligence in its every form.