As developers and scientists continue their efforts to develop and approximate artificial intelligence as close as they can to their human inspirations, newer differences often reveal themselves. It is widely understood that one of the many areas AI cannot match up to humans is due to the latter’s capacity for intuition. Honed by generations of evolutionary progress, all life forms have a certain degree of intuitive and instinctive capacity that sets them apart from mechanical contraptions. Human intuition has aided numerous pursuits of civilization and has even promoted human survivability over the numerous ages of the species’ existence and development. As the AI question returned to the limelight with ChatGPT making its way into the market, analyzing AI’s impact on human knowledge and its distinctness from human intuition is essential.
Society continues to experiment and unearth newer, often unexpected effects of artificial intelligence. The focus especially remains on students and the impact on their education, as AI might have an extensive impact on the way humans learn and assimilate information if these technologies are integrated into the academic superstructure. Though explorations in the field of AI and its applications in education are not bound to cease, drawing a separation can only be possible by evaluating the human edge over AI and AI’s disadvantages when it comes to organic learning.
AI & Humanity: Why Human Intuition Hasn’t Been Replicated
Evolution, instinct, and intuition are closely linked.
Image Credit: Gerd Altman from Pixabay
Impressive advancements in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence have allowed intuitive thinkers and inventors to use them to make human life simpler. While this has contributed to considerable levels of ease and a reduction in human effort, AI has not exactly come close to replacing human intuition. Addressing the question of why this hasn’t happened lies in decoding why AI was created and its primary purpose. While anyone with a limited understanding of AI and its functions might mention that AI is built to reduce human effort, the real relationship between AI and humanity lies in the reduction of cognitive load for the AI’s user. Humans, at least in recent times, have generated voluminous amounts of data in a very short period. However, the generation of data covers merely one side of the coin, with the consumption of information and data forming the other side of it. Despite the excellent capabilities of the human brain, information overload has detrimental consequences. AI has often been deployed to address precisely this, allowing its human operators to effortlessly access and understand condensed information for efficient ideation and decision-making.
Despite recent strides in developing more pointed AI capabilities with the use of language models, AI still indulges in mechanical processing and statistical association instead of intuitively deducing things and acting upon them. While humans often tap into their intuitive capabilities to solve problems in everyday life, for answers to complex questions, and even to make life-changing decisions, mechanical systems lack this capability. A human writer could intuitively pick an alternative set of words to describe a particular statement; however, essay writers like ChatGPT would rather leave it to statistical processing, producing a more mechanical piece of writing. While this is one of the numerous disadvantages of ChatGPT, it draws the line between human-written and artificially-generated content. Despite current conceptualizations to emulate human intuition and turn it into a functional AI intuition, progress has been slow, partly because AI and humans were always meant to work in unison, instead of the former replacing the latter’s effort entirely.
Artificial Intuition: An Attempt to Address AI’s Disadvantages & Propel Future Development
Emulating intuition artificially will require thorough understanding of how it works in humans.
Image Credit: Gerd Altman from Pixabay
The fact that AI is not quite disposed to intuitive thinking has not been missed by scientists. AI intuition, though not an entirely new concept, still requires pointed research and understanding to fructify into a tangible model that works. Human intuition has been studied carefully and over time by numerous disciplines to allow us a better understanding of human development and psychology. While humans have begun deploying disciplines such as computational linguistics in their attempts to develop better and more “intelligent” AI, emulating the human trait of intuition has still been elusive. Psychologists and cognitive scientists believe that intuition not only arises from mere understanding and amassing of knowledge, but also stems from a deep functional and experiential understanding of it. Functionally, artificial intuition must be able to analyze data in depth and come up with unique insights that are not easily gleaned from merely internalizing or rationalizing information. Humanity has developed AI over a considerable period of time, and its development has spanned 3 generations thus far. Numerous scientists have postulated the upcoming 4th generation of AI is poised to be endowed with artificial intuition.
Strides in developing better neural networks and advancing human understanding of cognitive and computational neuroscience are also helping researchers address the many disadvantages of AI deployment caused by its mechanical and rigid character. However, the intricacies of human intuition are also tied to complex aspects of semantic memory and repeated learning. Emulating these biological processes mechanically and synthetically will certainly pose an uphill challenge to the creation of artificial intuition. Complex and functional intuition also requires the agency of creativity—another innate quality of human functioning that has been one of the cardinal aspects that AI has not been able to replicate. Human knowledge, however, still cannot afford to be outsourced entirely, and scientists looking to synthesize evolution in a lab will need to revisit the original notions of why AI was created and the role of humans in the system to ensure learning is never hampered.
What the Future Holds
Future learning cannot be compromised by the outsourcing of human effort to AI tools.
Image Credit: Gerd Altman from Pixabay
While human intuition is not being replaced by its theoretical artificial counterpart anytime soon, focusing on knowledge gained as human beings and the impact of technologies on it requires deeper study and understanding. Given that the outsourcing of a portion of our cognitive load also comes with its share of disadvantages, the creation of advanced artificial intelligence systems must come only after analyzing the potential impact of building machines with intuitive capabilities. While most machines will and still do require considerable amounts of human inputs, the future of developing AI and chatbots such as ChatGPT must factor in human cognition, development, and the process of learning to avoid disturbing the balance.