Understanding Human Intelligence through Human Limitations
This work addresses the fundamental question of what distinguishes human intelligence from AI, offering a theoretical framework for researchers in cognitive science and AI.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding human intelligence by analyzing the computational problems shaped by human limitations in time, computation, and communication, and derives properties like rapid learning and cultural evolution from these constraints.
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 differ 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.