This is another post from a more philosophical perspective. In the western world our view of what it is to be human has changed dramatically over the past hundred years, from the 'soul trapped in a body' hypothesis to a view driven by psychology and genetics that we are merely sophisticated, if flawed, robots. I believe that this view has deeply affected our politics making a kind of semi-benign totalitarianism acceptable, and shifting the blame for individual failings to the group. "Society's to blame, your honour".

You'd think that someone who spends his time trying to reproduce human intelligence by robotic methods would be an ardent supporter of the 'scientific' view. You'd be surprised.

One insight that someone like me can give into the human condition is to spot areas where human intelligence is particularly sensitive or concentrated.  Workers in AI are asked to reproduce human judgment in a variety of areas. Some prove fairly simple, others very hard. A classic example is faces.  We, humans that is, are aware of the most subtle differences in size and shape of faces, an ability that's very hard to reproduce with technology.  

Another area is our estimate of other people’s intelligence. From my perspective, we massively over estimate the differences in intelligence in the people we encounter. To put it simply, the more intelligent of us overestimate dramatically how much cleverer we are than the rest of humanity. This is not unreasonable, because they generally have no external yardstick – but I do, and trust me, people, all people are absolutely amazing.

There are some intellectual problems that require a certain critical mass of intelligence. I’ve come across several examples in the past where seemingly perfectly bright people cannot solve a problem that other slightly brighter people can. I think we all encounter many of these, and it’s natural, if you can’t bridge the intellectual gap, to feel that it’s a yawning chasm. If you can, of course, it looks like a crack in the pavement.  These things reinforce our distorted sense of differences in ability.

The march of technology has left us feeling belittled. It’s been several years, for instance, since ‘Deep Blue’ beat Gary Kasparov at chess. Presumably mister Kasparov can drive a car and he speaks very eloquently about the risks to democracy in Russia in several languages. Deep Blue can do none of these things. It just plays chess well. It’s our ‘all-roundness’ that’s astonishing. We can make machines that perform individual tasks better than humans. We can’t make machines that do even a few of the things virtually every human being can do.

I’m not belittling of all the work that’s been done in my field, but we are not anywhere near to creating true artificial intelligence comparable to the human kind. We may be hundreds of years away.  Psychology is also nowhere near understanding human intelligence, let alone modeling it, and contents itself with finding interesting oddities in perception and cognition.

So where does this lead us in terms of improving the human condition? I think the key insight is that Nanny doesn’t know best, Nanny may not even know better. For several generations the intelligentsia has been suborned by the idea that, being so many times brighter, in their estimation, than hoi polloi they have every right to direct and regulate the rest of us. Socialism has been very attractive because it constructed a framework that made this arrogance morally acceptable. The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of the politically correct.

My insight is that these differences are massively overstated. To borrow another idea from AI, when you are uncertain of the quality of the analytical machine you are using for a particular task, and if you have several different machines you can use, adding a voting mechanism can considerably improve the decision making performance. I.e. the majority vote of a group of machines trying to solve a problem using different methods works better than any of the individuals alone.  I’m sure you can see where I’m heading - democracy really is the most efficient and most moral form of decision making.

So my suggestion is:  less government by cliques, less rule by clerks, more democracy.