The very “point of Choice”

“The sense of doing good, the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself…are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.” — Albert Camus, “A Life Worth Living”

AI developers may not want to acknowledge it but much of human intelligence is serendipitous. It’s not organized or planned-out like AI algorithms.

While thoughtful people can create the contours of an intelligent thought, they’re most likely to encounter an “a-ha” moment, when their thinking leaps to what they see as a solution or revelation.

These “a-ha” moments come about largely because of the interconnections among the three parts of the human brain. As Dr. Antonio Damasio has written “at the point of decision, emotions are very important for choosing. In fact even with what we believe are logical decisions,

the very point of choice is arguably always based on emotion.”

To achieve the goal of AI researchers, and build “a machine that can be made to simulate the human brain” AI researchers may need to encode “a-ha” moments.

However, Artifical Neural Networks ( ANNs) don’t have “a-ha” moments! They depend on rigor and coding discipline to arrive a “correct answer”. ANNs have no “satisfaction of being right”. They simply stop when they’ve determined they are statistically more likely to be right than wrong.

Coding “a-ha” moments, that “feel they’re right”, is likely to be the next big challenge for AI researchers. Until then AI researchers may have built nothing more than what Camus called a “rabid dog”.