HUMAN MACHINES

1 Machines are starting to do things that we used to consider inherently human. They can feel emotions such as regret and they can daydream. So what is it exactly that humans still do better than machines?

2 Quite simply, humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines. They have the ability to recognize many different types of patterns. If you have ever watched a baby learn words and concepts, you can observe that the small child starts to recognize patterns for differentiating between objects. Therefore, we can say that human intelligence is about being able to store more patterns.

3 Ray Kurzweil, an artificial intelligence pioneer, was among the first to recognize how the link between pattern recognition and human intelligence could be used to build the next generation of artificially intelligent machines. In his latest book, Kurzweil describes how he is teaching artificially intelligent machines to think, by introducing patterns to them gradually. According to Kurzweil, learning results from recursive processes of the brain. For example, when reading, you first recognize the patterns of each letter, then the patterns of individual words, then groups of words together, then paragraphs, finally chapters and books. Once a computer can recognize all of these patterns, it can read and “learn.”

4 The more you look around, the more you can see patterns around you. Getting to work on time in the morning is the result of recognizing patterns in your daily journey and responding to changes in schedule and traffic. Diagnosing an illness is also about recognizing patterns in human behavior. Machines just have so much processing power these days that it is easy to see them becoming the future doctors and lawyers of the world.

5 It is clear that being able to recognize patterns is the super power of humans. How we refine, shape and improve our pattern recognition for the good of humanity will define how much longer we will have superiority over machines.