A Brain That Can Only Do One Thing

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has made a good point – AI is not like human intelligence.

“I think one of the most unfortunate names is ‘artificial intelligence’,”Nadella told Bloomberg earlier this week. “I don’t like anthropomorphising AI,” added Nadella, “I sort of believe it’s a tool”.

This is a good steer – after all there’s an awful lot computers can’t do – emotion, sympathy, compassion, originality etc – and it does no good to have technologists trying to persuade us of ‘The Singularity’ or suggesting computers are anything like human brains and may, one day, outstrip them in capability.

To freshen its image AI re-invents itself in new manifestations e.g. ‘Generative AI’, meaning the ability to create content from stored data, with the latest being ‘AGI’ (Artificial General Intelligence) meaning an AI tool which can do more than one task.

AGI has not yet been achieved and no one knows when, or if, it can be. Which shows how far the tech lags the human brain.

Whoever heard of a human who could only do one thing?