Natural, Artificial, and Human Intelligences
Emmanuel M. Pothos, Dominic Widdows
TL;DR
The paper investigates whether chatbots qualify as intelligent by synthesizing perspectives from psychology, animal cognition, language and culture, and AI history. It traces the evolution from symbolic to data-driven AI, highlighting the rise of large language models and the evolving standards for evaluating intelligence, including ARC and Winograd benchmarks. It argues that language-enabled AI challenges the view that human intelligence is unique, while noting current systems lack full embodied perception and general problem-solving. The authors advocate a broader, embodiment-aware understanding of intelligence beyond human-centric benchmarks, anticipating future multimodal and embodied AI developments. Overall, the work emphasizes humility in assessing machine intelligence and the continuing importance of embodiment in understanding cognition across biological and artificial agents.
Abstract
Human achievement, whether in culture, science, or technology, is unparalleled in the known existence. This achievement is tied to the enormous communities of knowledge, made possible by language: leaving theological content aside, it is very much true that "in the beginning was the word", and that in Western societies, this became particularly identified with the written word. There lies the challenge regarding modern age chatbots: they can 'do' language apparently as well as ourselves and there is a natural question of whether they can be considered intelligent, in the same way as we are or otherwise. Are humans uniquely intelligent? We consider this question in terms of the psychological literature on intelligence, evidence for intelligence in non-human animals, the role of written language in science and technology, progress with artificial intelligence, the history of intelligence testing (for both humans and machines), and the role of embodiment in intelligence. We think that it is increasingly difficult to consider humans uniquely intelligent. There are current limitations in chatbots, e.g., concerning perceptual and social awareness, but much attention is currently devoted to overcoming such limitations.