Everyday Canvas

Artificial versus Human Intelligence

PROMPT: Do you think Artificial Intelligence will ever surpass human intelligence? Or has it already? With our reliance on digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, how far off are we from having them walking and acting in person rather than being part of our electronic devices?

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I tend to think that human intelligence and artificial intelligence are two different things. In some areas, artificial intelligence has surpassed human capability already. I am not sure even if in human form, a machine can be like a human being, no matter what its mechanical and computational assets are and no matter what today’s sci-fi stories claim.

Machines may be able to act, compute, and even reason better than humans, but they don’t have emotions. Most of human intelligence, I surmise, is fueled by emotions. I don’t have Siri, and Amazon just put Alexa in Kindle Fires, which is driving me nuts, as did Cortana which I disabled. Then try calling any company on the phone whose phones are first answered by a computer. For the simplest things, one has to push many buttons to get a decent answer. For that reason, one of these days I may break all the phones in the house, be it they may be attached to the landline or are cells.

Having said all that, I am so very sure I would have greatly appreciated a robot helping me today, as I cleaned the oven and took the oven door off first to do that. Putting it back was a major chore, although it was something I had done many times earlier. I thought I was going to have a heart attack doing it. If it weren’t for my hubby saving the day after two hours of trying, I’d have an oven without its door attached till kingdom come; therefore, a robot that could fix things around the house would be very welcome. Come to think of it, a house cleaning robot would get my eternal devotion, too.