Neither Artificial nor Intelligent

Summary. Editor's Note: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. We are surrounded by previously unthinkable advances in this field — facial recognition, natural language translation, voice recognition and generation, autonomous vehicles and so on — and new breakthroughs seem to emerge almost daily. However, it is also true that while intelligent machines can outperform humans in manifold tasks, as well as learn new ones, they literally do not understand what they are doing. Understanding comes from context. The uniquely human labor of filling in the cracks between bits of data with unprogrammable awareness is what creates meaning and constitutes a whole reality. This piece explores why human intelligence is still preferable – and desirable – to AI. The author also suggests that the way forward is using AI as a help, not mentor, to humans.