Do Words Like Smart & Intelligent Really Describe Our Machines?
That my phone can do things no other machine in the history of the world could do until very recently is beyond dispute. But is the word smart just something a clever marketer came up with, or is it an accurate description of what my phone really is? The same question can be asked about the use of the word intelligence, a quality increasingly being attributed to machines these days.
While no reasonable person would argue that there are things our technology can do better and faster than humans, these tend to be computational or highly repetitive tasks that machines can be programmed to do relatively easily. Even before the invention of the computer, industry had greatly enhanced productivity through the use of technology capable of performing the same task over and over again at greatly enhanced speed. A locomotive can run much faster and for far longer than a human, but we don’t refer to it as though it possessed some sort of embodied intelligence. Regardless, that we don’t need to stick to tracks or the road leaves us with a distinct advantage, our relative slowness not withstanding.
Intelligence is a word that’s actually pretty difficult to pin down. There’s general intelligence, commonly referred to simply as g, which we use the standardized IQ test to measure. However, in 1983 the developmental…
