Bots and Beasts by Paul Thagard

Author:Paul Thagard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Intelligence; artificial intelligence; machine intelligence; animal cognition; problem solving; learning; creativity; consciousness; ethics; mind.
Publisher: MIT Press

None of these capabilities is found in animals, so we are pressed to know their mental and neural origins.

Following Suzana Herculano-Houzel, I propose that these advantages result from humans having primate brains with an unusually large number of neurons in cortical areas. Cooking enabled human ancestors to evolve big brains that support improved mechanisms for representing the world and making inferences about it. With enough neurons, brains can operate recursively, looping to have representations about representations about representations and even inferences about inferences about inferences. Such rich representations and inferences enable people to have languages and emotions that support social cooperation that leads to degrees of culture and technology not found in other species. The increasing pace of culture and technology continues to move the human species further beyond the capacities of other animals.

One of the great accomplishments of human culture and technology is the development of machines that approximate human intelligence. Reflecting on differences between humans and other animals also sheds light on the current status and future prospects of machine intelligence. In chapter 3, we saw that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are bringing machines closer to humans. But out of the eighteen human advantages over animals I have listed, only number 8 (tools for making tools) and number 10 (navigation with maps) are accomplished by machines today. However, some animals also have capabilities that go beyond the reach of current AI, such as understanding causality and being conscious.

Because biological evolution moves so slowly, the gaps between humans and other animals are unlikely to close. But cultural and technological evolution moves rapidly, and no good arguments show that machines could never have any of the capacities in my list of eighteen differences. Explaining the human capacities that distinguish us from other animals will provide lessons about what AI needs to draw closer to what people can do. Whether we actually want to close the gap between natural and artificial intelligence is an ethical issue I examine in chapters 7 and 8.

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