My Brief Experience with AI
2026-07-17 | 2026-07-26
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
What is Intelligence?
My dear friend, Solus (Sol) Simkin and I were strolling by the river one evening when he suddenly popped the question “What is Intelligence?”, with a capital “I” to denote the generic nature of intelligence.
“Why, Sol, would you ask that?” I queried in turn.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage nowadays. People are afraid of being displaced from their jobs by AI. Some claim to do in minutes the work that took them several days in the past—somewhat like a motorcar cuts the time to travel a specified distance, compared to walking. There are those who praise AI. There are others who bemoan its very existence,” Sol explained.
“Do you know that Geoffrey Hinton, hailed as one of the (many) godfathers of AI, and a Nobel Prize winner—in of all things—Physics, expressed angst-filled regret at the worrisome creature he had helped create?”
Sol then listed several of Hinton’s reservations, which I have condensed below.
Hinton’s Disquiet
Hinton used to work at Google, but he resigned in May 2023 because he had serious reservations about AI. He feared that AI would pose an existential threat to human beings by becoming smarter than them; that it wouls spread misinformation, and that it could take away jobs from human beings. In all of this ran a refrain about the unconstrained motivation behind what Ai would do.
smarter than human beings, AI spreading misinformation, and Ai depriving jobs of human beimgs
“Rigour demands that I investigate Intelligence first, before I talk about artificial Intelligence. It is a bit like knowing what a sweetener is before holding forth on artificial sweeteners,” concluded Sol.
“Let us not bite off more than we can chew,” I replied. “Now that many of us have been exposed to AI, let us confine our conversation to the known animal before we start hunting for the Snark of Intelligence in its full glory.”
“Very well,” said Sol. Do you have much experience with AI? Have you used it for six months or longer? What do you think of it? Is it useful? Or over-rated?“. Sol started stacking his queries like a multi-storey apartment block.
“Let me experiment using AI for a few weeks. Let us meet after that and discuss what you think about AI and what my experience has been.” I replied.
“I would rather that our discussion was confined solely to your experience. A mish-mash of both our views would cloud and clutter rather than distil and refine.”
I thought of saying “Aye, aye, sir” but decided against being facetious, and simply nodded my assent.
Creativity and Human Intelligence
When Sol and I met at our favourite Orchard Valley Coffee House a few weeks later, I resumed the thread of our discussion on AI.
“Human beings are inherently creative. Our history of organic change over time is proof of it,” I began. “I have heard a child refer to rain as ‘sky juice’ and another child peered into an underground water sump and aksed ‘Whose house is this?’. Such freshness of metaphor or the wonder in interpreting new experiences fades away almost always after elementary or primary school. But we have it in us to be creative. And that is a uniquely human aspect of intelligence.
“Creativity in later life is less common but no less startling when it manifests itself. Shakespeare, among poets, enriched the English language, as well as the vocabulary of thought and metaphor, with his profoundly original use of words. Take for example his Sonnet 5, [1] where we have a rush of original and memorable coinages like
‘…never-resting time leads summer on to hideous winter’,
and
‘…a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass’.
The intense visual metaphors match the ragged fury of time that devours and lays waste physical beauty, which is, alas, all too short-lived.
“Another episode of creativity—this time in the scientifc domain—is that of Nikola Tesla, seeing in an insightful mental flash, the magnetic fields of the induction motor chasing each other, even as he recited the poetry of Goethe and witnessed a glorious sunset.
“These are examples of human creativity and intelligence that I think cannot be matched by the AI of today, although what AI might become in future is something I am not equipped to foretell.” I concluded.
“Well begun is half done,” [2] quipped Sol. “You have drawn a clear line in the sand about what contemporary AI is not. But what about your experience using AI? For starters, how many types of AI are there?”
Types of AI
“I am no expert in AI. Just a simple humble user,” I continued. “But I have already glimpsed of the raw power that AI brings to the table of human inquiry. The strengths that AI embodies rest on data, patterns, logic, and synthesis of existing knowledge. The results are a dazzling display of the known appearing in the fresh garb of the previously unseen. And that is both spectacular and tremendously helpful in any human inquiry. But enough of generalities. Let me get to the specifics.
The Turing Test
“I have to get off my chest one opinion before I go deeper into AI. I think that AI as we have it and use it today has already passed the Turing Test. When conversing with an AI, I never felt that I was conversing with anything other than a human at the other end. Only, instead of speaking, I was typing my responses, which were answered almost as soon as I finished typing, so much so that it left me panting simply to catch up on the conversation. I was also gratified that my anecdotal experience has been confirmed by a proper study that also acknowledged that contemporary AI had passed the Turing Test [3, 4]
AI saves time.
It needs to be checked.
It can synthesize and summarize vast swathes of data to give useful inferences or results.
Beware the time-waster
Not all AIs are the same. This message must have come through by now. Moreover, a “good AI” two years ago might have spiralled downward to mediocrity.
An AI does not know how to say ‘I do not know’. And this can lead to a disastrous waste of time that could amount to hours or days.
Acknowledgements
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