Understanding Human Intelligence through Human Limitations

Recent progress in artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to ask the question of what is unique about human intelligence, but with a new comparison class. I argue that we can understand human intelligence, and the ways in which it may di er from artificial intelligence, by considering the characteristics of the kind of computational problems that human minds have to solve. I claim that these problems acquire their structure from three fundamental limitations that apply to human beings: limited time, limited computation, and limited communication. From these limitations we can derive many of the properties we associate with human intelligence, such as rapid learning, the ability to break down problems into parts, and the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution. Understanding Human Intelligence through Human Limitations Di erent Computational Problems, Di erent Kinds of Intelligence As machines begin to outperform humans on an increasing number of tasks, it is natural to ask what is unique about human intelligence. Historically, this has been a question that is asked when comparing humans to other animals. The classical answer (from Aristotle, via the Scholastics) is to view humans as "rational animals" - animals that think [18]. More modern analyses of human uniqueness emphasize the "cognitive niche" that humans fill, able to use their minds to outsmart the biological defenses of their competitors [43], or contrast this with the "cultural niche" of being able to accumulate knowledge across individuals and generations in a way that makes it possible to live in an unusually diverse range of environments [10, 25, 26]. Asking the same question of what makes humans unique, but changing the contrast class to include intelligent machines, yields a very di erent kind of answer. In this article I argue that even as we develop potentially superhuman machines, there is going to be a flavor of intelligence that remains uniquely human.