Creative Intelligence

For the longest time one key distinction between humans and machines that set us apart was the innate human ability to create.  Creativity was something which many people believed machines would never be able to mimic.  However as technology has advanced and we have developed further understanding of neural networks, we have been able to create artificial intelligence agents that can take a wealth of art that has been created by humans throughout history, analyse it, and begin to create new works of art in similar styles that have never been seen before.

There is even an AI that can create photos of people that never existed, which is an incredible achievement considering this is not something humans can actually do.  You can become adept at drawing faces and you can become quite skilled with photo editing software, but human beings for the most part are incapable of imagining faces that do not exist.  Every single face you can imagine in your head right now is a memory of a person you once saw, whether you knew them or not, whether the memory is accurate or not.  This is one of the limitations of the human mind.  When it comes to being truly random, human beings are surprisingly incapable.

Take for example asking an individual to pick numbers at random.  At first you might think it would be unlikely that you could tell which numbers they would pick, but that isn't the case.  A deeper understanding of the statistics of probability, coupled with observations of a person's behaviours and habits, finally combined with cultural influences, can allow you to predict with accuracy what a person will choose.  There is a famous mentalist in the UK called Derren Brown who made TV series based around this concept in which he performed a series of seemingly impossible tasks all centred around the apparent ability to read peoples' minds.

What is actually at work here are a number of principles, the first being Benford's Law which deals with the distribution of numbers in apparently random sets, the second is the Blue-Seven Phenomenon which is a statistical observation that the colour Blue, and the number seven, are the two most likely choices a person will make when asked to choose at random from a set that includes both of these.  The point being, however irrational, unique, or unpredictable we like to think we are, the truth is we are not.  The more people there are in the world and the more we are observed, the more accurately our behaviour can be predicted.

We have reached a point in our story of humanity and its love affair with AI where the entities we have created are beginning to outpace us not just in terms of processing power and intellect as has been the case for decades, but also in terms of exhibiting behaviours we long associated as distinctly human.  We're at a crossroads now where the entities we have created might actually become more human-like than actual humans, whilst our understanding of humanity and its limitations is reducing humanity itself to a state of being that is more machine-like than the very entities we have created.