Donald Clark talks about the problems with intelligences. He unpacks the tendency of the IQ test to prioritise logical and mathematical skills, the false hope of single measure associated with Multiple Intelligences and the confusion between personality and Emotional Intelligences. Clark suggests that we need to move on from the discussion of intelligence being centred on the brain and instead focus on networks. This harks back to
David Weinberger’s claim that the ‘smartest person in the room is the room’. In the end, maybe the word ‘intelligence’ may need to be abandoned.
We would do well to abandon the word ‘intelligence’, as it carries with it so much bad theory and practice. Indeed AI has, in my view, already transcended the term, as it had success across a much wider sets of competences (previously intelligences), such as perception, translation, search, natural language processing, speech, sentiment analysis, memory, retrieval and other many other domains. All of this was achieved without consciousness. It is all competence without comprehension.
This reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s discussion of dead metaphors.
via Stephen Downes
