Yes, humans are smarter than the best computers. The best computers are less intelligent than my cat, much less a human. I’m going to explain why that is. And then I’m going to explain why people think computers are smarter than humans when that’s obviously not the case.
To understand this, we need to talk concepts. What’s “smart”? Computer nerds like to think that intelligence is just processing power, but that’s nonsense. A pocket calculator works faster than a human brain, for example, but that doesn’t make it smart.
For example, take the following: 104723 * 104729. If you type that into a pocket calculator, it will output the correct answer of 10967535067 in a fraction of a second. The time interval it takes the calculator to crunch those numbers is measured in microseconds. The smallest unit of time a human can perceive is measured in milliseconds, a thousand times slower. In other words, a pocket calculator can crunch those numbers faster than you can even perceive. Meanwhile, even the most intelligent humans take millions of times longer to crunch those numbers.
And yet, humans are smarter than pocket calculators. In fact, that sentence barely makes sense, because what pocket calculators do is simply nothing like human intelligence.
For that matter, there are compute clusters that draw enormous amounts of electricity — more than my house uses in many months — and crunch billions of calculations per second. The end result is a picture of Scarlett Johansson with three boobs. Fantastic job, Mr. Machine God. You really knocked it out of the park.
This whole thing seems very obvious to me. I don’t fully understand why someone would ask this question. And yet, a lot of people seem to answer this question in the negative and say that, no, computers are smarter than people. But I think I know why. Let me explain…
Many people fetishize compute. They have a superstitious belief that you can achieve anything just by adding more processing power. As if processing power were some kind of pixie dust that could solve any problem. It’s nonsense. Even with infinite processing power, some things are impossible. Point in case: let’s say I take a picture of my cat. I compress that picture to 50x50 pixels. In this instance, information has been lost. There is no amount of processing power that can recover that lost information. A powerful neural network can make probabilistic guesses and fabricate a larger image approximating the smaller one, but it’s not the same. There is no power on Earth that can bring back that lost information. No matter how many billions of transistors and screaming GPU clusters you have, no matter how clever your neural networks are, no matter how many matrices you have crunching that info, you can never recover the lost information. It’s gone, Jim.
The idea that such a computer is “smarter” than a human is, I suspect, downstream of the autistic cognitive style common to STEM workers — and I’m on the spectrum myself, so no complaining in the comments! Such people have a tendency to hyper focus, and I know because I, too, am this way. We have a tendency to focus like a laser on one specific thing. But there is a weakness to this way of thinking.
The weakness is this: concentration is fundamentally the ability to ignore things. If I hyper-focus on one object, then, by definition, I am excluding everything else from my vision. “Concentrate on X” just means “Ignore everything else except for X”. That’s all it is.
As a result, STEM workers tend to ignore context in ways that are detrimental to long-term and holistic thinking. This is why I don’t like technocracy: holistic, contextual awareness is fundamental to governance, and STEM people tend to lack that awareness. It makes them do dumb things, like believe that a GPU cluster is smarter than a human because the GPU cluster has a really fast clock speed. Because when you’re hyper-fixated on clock speed, you tend to forget that there are other aspects of cognition, assuming “clock speed” is relevant to brains in the first place. This is also why we force engineering students to take humanities classes, no matter how much they whine about it. Apparently, we’re not forcing them to take enough. If anything, the requirements should be increased.
