Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in a short time. It has managed to create self-driving vehicles, recreate the periodic table of elements, predict depression from speech, and identify crop diseases. Imagining what AI can do as it improves feels infinite.
But the question remains how intelligent artificial intelligence really is and whether it can ever truly rival human-level intelligence. Society has had its perception of AI skewed slightly because of movies and television, making us all think that it is only a matter of time before super computers rule us all.
What Is Intelligence?
Understanding what intelligence is can be an important first step. Intelligence goes well beyond pattern recognition. It includes inventiveness, language, creativity, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, and a wide array of other aspects.
There is the argument that machine learning can produce all of these domains but it is an unproven commodity at this point. Still, AI has created original art, composed music, predicted human emotions, and interpreted both text and speech.
AI Still Has a Long Way to Go
The human brain is a biological solution that is capable of several forms of intelligence. Ai is still nowhere near being capable of reproducing even the brain of a toddler, let alone a fully mature adult who has developed a prefrontal cortex.
Still, we need to understand that artificial intelligence is still in its infant stages. What it can do now seems incredible but if there is hope that it can mimic or perhaps surpass human intelligence, there is much that needs to be done.
Artificial Intelligence is changing the way that we look at many different vocations and is seeing a sort of data revolution in some respects. But it may be decades, if at all, before artificial intelligence is truly capable of replacing human thought.
In the final evolutionary stage for superintelligence, AI will not require any appendages when its capabilities truly supersede human intelligence. For now, what artificial intelligence can achieve remains a riddle that we will all intently await the answer to.