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A Higher Intelligence

Imagine a smarter species or AI.

Like many writers, neuroscientists, philosophers and AI folks dealing with intelligence I sometimes wonder what would a higher Intelligence be like and that is what we will be talking about, along the way we will also start untangling what Intelligence is, something useful if we want to eventually recreate it artificially.

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Asking what would constitute a higher intelligence by necessity implies some knowledge of what Intelligence is, so if part of Intelligence is our capacity for abstraction ( another hard to pin down term ) a higher intelligence would presumably have a higher abstraction capacity or attribute related to it, but we also don’t know if there are other types of intelligent attributes out there (the unknown unknowns of intelligence if you will).

Our frame of reference. We should also admit from the start that we have no idea where we stand in the universal intelligence scale (or even if such a thing exists), so the best next thing is to compare intelligence amongst species and even within ourselves, but humbly and without any agenda other than to gain knowledge ...ok enough disclaimers let's get to it.

Learning and Memory

On top of our cognitive abilities memory stands out as it is both a key element of intelligence and at the same time quite limited, we can remember many things for very long periods but have limited ( and sometimes lacking ) capacity, speed of learning and accuracy, let’s dissect a bit more:

Memory Capacity

A Higher Intelligence (HI) would be capable of remembering what it ate last Thursday ( do you ? ) and the previous 10 yrs, entire books, 1,000s of face-name pairs and beat us all at trivia night at the pub or jeopardy.

Of note here is that we derive some of our intelligence from selectively remembering some things while ignoring or forgetting the vast majority of things we…