President Trump doesn’t like the phrase “artificial intelligence.” I don’t blame him — there is no such thing.
Consciousness is a type of intelligence. One of the leading theories of consciousness is Integrated Information Theory. In essence, the capacity to integrate more information into ever more complex systems elicits more consciousness. At their A.I. core, integrating vast amounts of data into complex systems is what large language models do. Then, with powerful inferential models, they transform unseen raw data into useful information. The resultant synthesis is derived from real-world data.
Consider natural intelligence formulated in the human brain. There’s a phenomenon wherein some people who’ve experienced traumatic brain injury suddenly become geniuses. One example of this is sudden savant syndrome. Neurologists postulate that the brain hemispheres in these sudden geniuses are communicating more fluidly.
A related condition is synesthesia, wherein the brain routes sensory information through multiple senses. More stimuli are being integrated, leading to interesting new insights. In fact, per the famed Cleveland Clinic, “people with synesthesia tend to be more intelligent, creative and have better memory abilities.”
In a noteworthy parallel, A.I. is also intelligent and creative as it synthesizes data based on existing information, thereby creating new datasets. The results may be described as “synthetic,” but is that the same as “artificial”? Even if the data are extracted through creative iteration, the synthesis transforms them into useful information. As President Trump emphasized, it is not “artificial,” but genius.
Indeed, the neurological concept of synesthesia is ingeniously being applied in the A.I. world. For example, tech titan Google is developing an A.I. tool that simulates synesthesia. It “has the potential to revolutionize the way we perceive and interact with the world around us.” Nothing artificial about that.
Of course, there is a stark distinction between artificial artifacts and downright fakes. Garbage in (e.g., fake news) leads to garbage out. Nonetheless, that’s not the intent of the A.I. initiatives that Trump is trumpeting. A.I. platforms that are assiduously trained on real-world data can unveil heretofore hidden relationships that enhance our knowledge and further our natural intelligence.
Human intelligence may uncover some of it, but there may be ontological limits to what we can ever know about being and existence — that is, whether our brains are wired to fully define the totality of reality, let alone comprehend it. Nevertheless, we’re very curious and have uncovered a lot of nature’s secrets, with our knowledge expanding by integrating more and more complex information with the help of A.I. Perhaps there are a priori truths that run the universe that A.I. (and, eventually, quantum computers) will someday reveal. Again, it’s not artificial, but genius.
President Trump is right: A.I. does need a name change. Maybe the label can be applied to nefarious instantiations that generate fake news, deepfakes, concocted videos, and illicit images. That’s all artificial, for sure, but there is nothing really “intelligent” about it. Neither is it related to the revolutionary implementations that Trump and the White House Office of Science and Technology imagine.
“Artificial intelligence” is an oxymoron. If we’ve imagined something intelligently, perhaps with real-world applications, how can that possibly be artificial? Maybe it is splitting hairs, but I’ll go with President Trump on this one, who said, “I don’t even like the name. I don’t like anything that’s artificial. ... It’s not artificial. It’s genius.”
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