Understanding Intelligence
© 2004, Coert Visser We often routinely talk about intelligence and we attempt to measure it for a variety of purposes. But how well do we know what it is? Jeff Hawkins is one of the first people to present a specific and comprehensive theory of intelligence with a leading role for the human neocortex. Hawkins starts by stating that Human intelligence is fundamentally different from what a computer does. But isn’t artificial intelligence (AI) a good metaphor for human intelligence? No, says Hawkins. In AI a computer is taught to solve problems belonging to a specific domain based on a large set of data and rules. In comparison to human intelligence, AI systems are very limited. They are only good for the one thing they were designed for. Teaching an AI based system to perform a task like catching a ball is hard because it would require vast amounts of data and complicated algorithms to capture the complex features of the environment. A human would have little difficulty with solving su...