The other day I heard a fellow co-work comment that AI is just really good pattern matching. That took the excitement out of AI when I thought about it that way. Then I ran into “Thin Slicing” as described in “Blink – The Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell says, thin-slicing is the “ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very narrow slices of experience.” He gives some examples that might be familiar to you, what you could call “gut instinct” or “intuition”. It is the knowing without a long period of analysis and thought. Our brains are amazing! But I don’t need to tell you that.
This brought back some of my previous excitement around AI. I don’t believe that AI will ever compare with the human brain or that we can create sentient AI. We have the most advanced pattern matching and analysis machine right now, but we need to learn to use it. Malcom argues we can and I think that is backed up by “Creativity – A short and cheerful guide” by John Cleese in which Mr. Cleese explores the creative process of being a comedian. He notes how if he slept on a difficult problem the next morning when he woke up suddenly the answer would come to him. He attributes it to his unconscious mind “chewing everything over the moment [he stopped] working”. As a software developer I experienced this with difficult problems.
I’m not done with Mr. Gladwell’s’ book yet but I’m excited to see his insights along with other books I’ve read and my own experiences.