AI reveals intelligence we've never seen before, and it's not human-like
A new paper argues that AI's real value lies not in copying human thinking, but in discovering entirely new forms of intelligence. The finding has major implications for how companies develop AI systems and how policymakers should regulate them—suggesting we need frameworks designed around alien intelligences, not just better versions of human cognition.
Originaltitel: AI-as-exploration: Navigating intelligence space: [IA como exploración: Navegando el espacio de inteligencia]
<p>Artificial Intelligence is a field that lives many lives, and the term has come to encompass a motley collection of scientific and commercial endeavours. In this paper, I articulate the contours of a rather neglected but central scientific role that AI has to play, which I dub “AI-as-exploration”. The basic thrust of AI-as-explora tion is that of creating and studying systems that can reveal candidate building blocks of intelligence that may dif fer from the kinds of human and animal intelligence we are familiar with. In other words, I suggest that AI is one of the best tools we have for exploring intelligence space, namely the space of possible intelligent systems. I illus trate the value of AI-as-exploration by focusing on a specific case study, i. e., recent work on the capacity to com bine novel and invented concepts in humans and Large Language Models. I show that the latter, despite showing human-level accuracy in such a task, probably solve it in ways radically different, but no less relevant to intelli gence research, to those hypothesised for humans.</p>