To understand what AI is, we should start with the meaning of the words artificial and intelligence. The Cambridge dictionary defines artificial as something "made by people, often as a copy of something natural" and intelligence as "the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason". If we combine these two definitions, we can summarise what artificial intelligence is as follows: a multi-functional technology, created by people as a copy of the human brain, able to learn, understand, make judgments and have opinions based on reason. We may not be there yet, but we are accelerating. Or maybe we are already there, but we just do not know it yet.
According to the theory of multiple intelligence developed in 1983 by Prof. Dr. Howard Gardner, intelligence can be classified into 8 different types: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal and naturalistic. These 8 types of intelligence can be better understood in terms of the abilities that manifest themselves in different activities.
People with linguistic intelligence will thrive in activities such as activism and politics, lawyer, orator, editor, professor, journalist, writer, etc. People with dominant logical-mathematical intelligence are suited to be engineers, accountants, statisticians, analysts, programmers, scientists. Those with spatial intelligence are better prepared for jobs such as architect, designer, photographer, painter, pilot, etc. Kinesthetic intelligence is related to manual dexterity but also to body movement and is needed by actors, dancers, surgeons, sportsmen, jewelers, mechanics, etc. Musical intelligence is needed by those who compose, perform and critique music or build and repair musical instruments. Intrapersonal intelligence is appropriate for philosophers, thinkers, psychologists or politicians, and so on. Interpersonal intelligence is suitable for people such as diplomats, psychologists, salesmen, promoters, politicians, leaders, etc., and naturalistic intelligence involves classifying, identifying and observing different forms in nature and distinguishing natural systems from artificial or artificialised ones.
If we analyse AI from this perspective, we can see that it already possesses many of these types of intelligence, and even at a level beyond human intelligence. Until not so long ago, there was a belief that any result obtained by a computer was either correct or incorrect depending on the data input and the decision points designed. In traditional programming, what mattered was the correctness of the input data and knowing where and how to put the
"question", i.e. the sequence of steps, IF-THEN-ELSE. In other words, a decision tree, predictable and verifiable, because a condition fulfilled leads to another decision point, and so on until the result is obtained.
By comparison, artificial intelligence is not programmed in fixed steps, so the path between inputs and outputs is unpredictable and unverifiable. Due to its self-learning capability, each time, for the same input data, the result will be different. In the case of artificial intelligence, there is a "black box" (Source: World Travel and Tourism Council: Introduction to AI 2024. All rights reserved.) between the inputs and outputs, which makes the AI unreliable. How the AI arrives at the result inside the "black box" is often unknown even to the developers, and the intermediate steps through which the result was obtained cannot be verified.
Image: AI-generated image with Copilot