Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is relatively in its early stages of development. It is a vast field that is not explored enough. Right now, no one knows what direction the AI development would take because there are simply too many aspects of AI. To replace human intelligence, an AI needs to be self-aware and have consciousness, which is not possible, at least as of now. For some people, AI is the combination of data-driven mathematical algorithms that require the computing power provided by humans. These people argue that AI will not be able to surpass its creator.

Existing AI

For an AI to supersede human intelligence, it needs to develop emotions and imaginations. However, the current AI algorithms only do what they are told to do by the programmers. For example, what would an AI-equipped car do if it needs to choose between saving a passenger or a pedestrian? These types of problems can be solved by human values such as empathy instead of mathematics or probability.

What Can AI Do?

Today, the AI does a lot of tasks that were previously done by humans. It computes millions and billions of processes in a second to solve computer science problems. AI is responsible for the automation of a large part of the industry. However, the fundamental limitation of an AI is its inability to think on its own. Smart assistants, forecasting models, virtual reality, and so on are actually the complicated algorithms dictated by the background code that is created by humans.

The current intelligence in AI is simply not very intelligent instead it is just good at following orders. It is purely good at following instructions at lightning speeds. For this reason, we can say that the AI is neither self-aware nor consciousness because it cannot learn things that it is not instructed to learn. It is unable to decide independently.

AI and Human Brain

The human brain is a complex collection of more than 86 billion neurons. This number is greater than the total number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Each neuron is made up of billions of proteins, and proteins are made up of hundreds of thousands of amino acids, these amino acids contain protons, electrons, and neutrons, etc. We currently don’t understand how these primitive components with no inherent ability to understand have combined to form consciousness. Unless we understand this structure of the brain, we will not be able to create another conscious being.

The structure of a human brain is the foundation of autonomous decision making and independent thinking. To create an AI that is able to replace human intelligence, we would need to create a computational model of the human brain. However, the technology required to create a model at this enormous scale does not exist at this time. In addition, there is no guarantee if this type of technology can ever be created. Thus, we can say that artificial intelligence cannot replace human intelligence. However, at present, the AI is replacing human roles in certain industries and putting people out of jobs. This problem can be solved by making humans do the creative work that AI cannot do and allow AI to do repetitive computational work.

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