Fear artificial intellect, not AI

By Albert DeSimone

Understanding the difference between “intelligence” and “intellect” is key to managing the fears many have of artificial intelligence. 

Intelligence, either artificial or human, is a binary view of the world. Intelligence acts by bundling a series of true/false conclusions that are important to gathering a fact-driven basis for knowledge. Intellect, however, results from a nuanced and incredibly complex, and sometimes unclear, interaction of those facts as they are entangled in the emotional, subjective, sentient, and compassionate recesses of the human mind and heart. 

Intelligence is a digital understanding of the world. Intellect is an analog view of the world.

Similar to the difference between digital and analog music, there is a warmth and subtlety to an analog recording that is lost in digital production. And it is that subtlety and warmth that differentiates intelligence from intellect.

Intelligence is cold-blooded. Intellect is warm-blooded.

From Gutenberg and the printing press, Henry Ford’s assembly line in the early 1920s, the personal computer (1970s), the Internet in the 1990s, to Artificial Intelligence today, humans have created tools. Progressively more powerful tools, but tools nonetheless.

Although only a tool today, should artificial intelligence evolve into artificial intellect and potentially develop consciousness, self-awareness, and emotions, including hate, then we should worry.

It will be like Father John Culkin said: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

Albert DeSimone is a retired University of Georgia information technologist who resides in Bishop.