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Tomorrow I am going to be part of a panel at COMPSAC 2018 discussing “a smarter future”. I will be focussing on the trend towards symbiotic autonomous systems and will be claiming that this is a path towards a smarter future.
I’d like to share with you a few thoughts and, please, I am looking forward to your comments, and … dissent!
If one looks around and just stops for a moment observing cars, planes, hospitals, smartphones… well, one cannot avoid congratulating the human species for all these achievements! Compare today with 200 years ago, and then again with our ancestors 2000, 20,000, 200,000 years ago and there is no question about it: we are way smarter than our ancestors.
Wait a moment. Are we really smarter?
Imagine yourself being brought and left in a jungle, in the middle of a savana, in a desert … These are all places that our ancestors lived in, and managed to survive to the point that we are their descendant. What would you think your success survival probability would be? Pretty low, to be on the optimistic side! Looking at the question from this perspective would surely lead us to reconsider the ranking of smartness between us and our ancestors.
Now consider yourself as a smart individual, let’s say an engineer that is one of the best around (lets’ boost our morale a bit) in designing advanced computers. And think about being transported to the time of the Roman Empire (so just about 2000 years back in time). Do you think you would be able to build a computer and surprise the Emperor with your wizardry?
No, you won’t be able to build a computer because you have no idea how to get the raw materials that are needed, nor -once you have them- how to process them to become usable (and “No” for many many more reasons, including the absence of electrical power at that time!).
It is not because you have been transported back 2000 years. Even today you won’t be able to build a computer without having access to the variety of supply chains involved and leveraging on other people skills and knowledge!
So what is the point I am making? We are not really smarter than our ancestors, we just happen to live in a different environment and we have grown to be adapted to this environment as they grew to be adapted to their environment. Each one, me and my great-great grandfather, are equally adapted, smart, to survive in our own environment.
What makes possible the amazing things that we are using every day, and the way we live our life today, is the symbioses between ourselves and today’s environment. This includes the access to other people’s skill, knowledge, to tools ever more sophisticated, to a culture that has grown to value innovation (it was not so just 500 years ago!) to an economy that can exploit and share value produced across the world making distance almost irrelevant.
Notice that I am not talking about “intelligence” but about “smartness”. The two are distinct concepts, although there is some relation between them. An intelligent person is likely to be smart but it is not a given. There are plenty of examples of very intelligent people that are not smart at all in normal life situations. You can learn to be smarter, you cannot learn to be more intelligent (although higher education for sure enable your intelligence to bloom). Intelligence is not about symbioses, smartness is.
Take some time to watch the clip.
More to come.
