Humans vs. Computers
Explore the contrast between human intelligence and computer processing in solving tasks. Understand how computers excel at arithmetic while humans are better at recognizing images, illustrating challenges in artificial intelligence development.
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How computers understand information
Computers are nothing more than calculators at heart. They are very fast at doing arithmetic. This is great for tasks that match what a calculator does—summing numbers for sales, applying percentages to work out taxes, and plotting graphs of existing data.
Even watching catch-up TV or streaming music through your computer doesn’t involve much more than the computer executing simple arithmetic instructions again and again. It may surprise you, but reconstructing a video frame from the 1s and 0s that are piped across the internet to your computer is done using arithmetic that isn’t much more complex than the sums we did in school.
Adding up numbers really quickly—thousands, or even millions of numbers a second—may be impressive, but it isn’t artificial intelligence. A human may find it hard to do large sums very quickly, but the process of doing it doesn’t require much intelligence at all. It simply requires an ability to follow very basic instructions, and this is what the electronics inside a computer do.
Now let’s flip things and turn the tables on computers! Let’s look at the following images and see if we can recognize what they contain.
We can look at pictures with human faces, a cat, or a tree, and recognize the images. In fact, we can do it rather quickly and to a very high degree of accuracy. We don’t often get it wrong. We can process the large amount of information that images contain very successfully and recognize what’s in the image. This kind of task isn’t easy for computers. In fact, it’s incredibly difficult.
| Problem | Computer | Human |
|---|---|---|
| Multiply thousands of large numbers quickly | Easy | Hard |
| Find faces in a photo of a crowd of people | Hard | Easy |
We suspect image recognition needs human intelligence—something machines lack, however complex and powerful we build them—because machines are not human. But it is exactly these kinds of problems that we want computers to get better at solving, because they’re fast and don’t get tired. Artificial intelligence is all about solving these kinds of hard problems.
Of course, computers will always be made of electronics, and so the task of artificial intelligence is to find new kinds of recipes or algorithms, which work in new ways to try to solve these kinds of harder problems. Even if these new methods don’t work perfectly, they can work well enough to give the impression of a human-like intelligence at work.
Key points
- Some tasks are easy for traditional computers, but hard for humans. For example, multiplying millions of pairs of numbers is difficult for a human.
- On the other hand, some tasks are hard for traditional computers, but easy for humans. For example, it’s difficult for a computer to recognize faces in a photo of a crowd.