Follow on from previous post ( 5/7 minute read)

Having just posted an overview of Future of Artificial Intelligence it would be remiss of me not to address the Intelligence that is creating the AI in the first place.

So here another fascinating subject.

The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation.

It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.

This post will only scrap the skin of the subject Intelligence.

As I have said; Technology” in its broadest sense, include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions, and our intellects.

There are many questions like if Artificial Intelligence is to become self learning will it in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds or will we with our basic intelligence be left asking Google just what is Intelligence?

Perhaps we will experience a positive feedback loop from the behavior of these learning algorithms resulting in a enhanced human surrounded by vast machine intellects.

Or are we going to be looking at myriad types of intelligences at play:

With the ordinary human rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them; familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, are we going to experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences. For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.

We may even see human minds uploaded into cyberspace, with further hybridization to follow in the purely virtual realm. These uploaded minds could combine with artificial algorithms and structures to produce an unknowable but humanlike consciousness.

This is just the beginning of “shared thought.” Far future vision is the spread of our non-biological intelligence to the four corners of the universe, infusing our deliberate will directly upon its fate.

If we are able to break the speed of light barrier we could have a universal omnipresence within a few centuries.

Human intelligence is disappearing into  big data and large-scale network.

Is it our destiny?

In any case, let us all hope the boundaries of reality continue to expand the unknown at least as fast as our ability to consume and understand it, lest we be caught in the forever loop of The End is Just the Beginning.

So let me with my basic Intelligence ask you the reader.

What is Intelligence?

It is clear that human intelligence has changed since the emergence of the very first hominids.

Artificial Intelligence machines will soon be equaling the power of human thought-with all of its complexities and richness and perhaps even outstripping it.

General intelligence can be described as the ability of an individual to acquire and apply knowledge and thus, can be passed down from generation to generation.

Environmental and migrational factors have influenced human intelligence since we emerged for the caves but evolution has not yet had a chance to catch up to the rapid progress we have made as a society and might not due to human circumvention of natural selection.

The migration of people to all areas of the earth along with the industrialization of modern society has abstracted modern man from our ancestors.

A greater importance has been placed on cognitive ability and intelligence to allow us to function in modern society. But to say that human intelligence has evolved to the point of stagnation is quite absurd.

I would say because of the need to work for survival is now greatly lessened we are now in a state of limbo where there is no evolutionary pressure, unless there is a dramatic change in the environment, or we are not able to support as many people living on the earth.

And I also believe that the evolution of human intelligence will cease some time in the distant future.

The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—or at least the human minds of today.

It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.

The human minds might not be capable of understanding the physics of the atomic realm. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.

Ordinary humans of the future will come to accept machine intelligence as everyday technological magic, like the flat screen TV or smart phone, but with no deeper understanding of how it is possible.

Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies:

So the potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Cognitive ability is influenced by thousands of genetic loci, each of small effect.

The first thing to notice is that the longer the time scale we are considering, the less likely it is that technological civilization will remain within the zone we termed “the human condition” throughout.

Vaclav Smil – the historian of technology who has argued that the past six generations have seen the most rapid and profound change in recorded history – maintains that the 1880s was the most innovative decade of human history.

It has taken us so far as to change our little make-shift huts to buildings that touch the sky, and to change our raw meat into seven-course meals

Humanity has enough intelligence to move into outer space and explore other worlds on the other hand we don’t seem to have the Intelligence to see or resolve the problems confronting us today.

Why?

It’s not that we lack the Intelligence to do so.

People are unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.

If you look around you I am sure you will agree that we have an awful long way to go before we reach basic Intelligence in order to live in peace and cherish the world we live on.  

Because the currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes.

The discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from our intelligence so far.