Right now, AI is having a moment — and it’s not the first time grand predictions about the potential of machines are being made. But, what does it really mean to say something like ChatGPT is “intelligent”? What exactly is intelligence? In this season of the Complexity podcast, The Nature of Intelligence, we'll explore this question through conversations with cognitive and neuroscientists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts in six episodes. Together, we'll investigate the complexities of human intelligence, how it compares to that of other species, and where AI fits in. We'll dive into the relationship between language and thought, examine AI's limitations, and ask: Could machines ever truly be like us?
Melanie: Right now, AI is having a moment — and it’s not the first time people have made grand predictions about what machines could do. It might seem obvious to say that something like ChatGPT is intelligent. But is it?
Alison: It's like asking, is the University of California Berkeley library smarter than I am? Well, it definitely has more information in it than I do, but it just feels like that's not really the right question.
Melanie: So instead, we want to know: what, exactly, is intelligence?
Melanie: I’m Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and I study cognition and artificial intelligence.
Abha: And I’m Abha Eli Phoboo, Director of Communications at the Santa Fe Institute.
Abha: In this upcoming season, The Nature of Intelligence, we’re speaking with cognitive scientists, developmental psychologists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts to understand our own intelligence.
Gary: We are good at collaboration and sharing knowledge. I think that we're individually not that smart.
Abha: And, how other species and new technologies compare.
Erica: We've known for a long time that elephants are able to converge at a particular location, like far away at this tree on this day at this time. And people really didn't know how they were doing it.
Murray: Sometimes you're interacting with a large language model, and it can do something really astonishing. And then the next moment, they'll give an answer to a question which is utterly stupid.
Abha: We’ll investigate the relationship between language and thinking.
Tomer: You could say, “Look, I see this mug, and I say, ‘mug.’ How does that work?” It's a trillion dollar question.
Ev: There are some individuals who are severely linguistically impaired. Like the language system is gone for as best as we can test it and yet, they're okay cognitively.
Steve: It could have been that language was the substrate that we used for everything, but it seems that that's not right, right? That you can do quite a bit in language without having much reasoning.
Melanie: We’ll consider where AI falls short.
Linda: There's a lot of stuff out there that's not accurate, dead wrong, and odd.
Tomer: “Okay, but how would you write your name? Just try in Hebrew,” things like that. And it said, “Look, I can't write it.” And this is all happening in Hebrew. “I can't write Claude in Hebrew.” And it's writing it in Hebrew.
Abha: And we’ll ask: Will machines ever be like us?
John: I think there's a difference between saying, can we reach human levels of intelligence, the way humans do it, versus can we end up with the equivalent phenomenon, without having to do it the way humans do it.
Murray: If something really does really behave exactly like a conscious being, is there anything more to say?
Melanie: Join us September 25th wherever you get your podcasts.