16 June 2021 - mountain intuition

Show me a picture of mountains, and I can often tell whether it is from the Rockies, the Andes, or the Himalayas. They look different, in some way I can’t explain. That mysterious intuition is not only a source of useless random judgments, it is how humanity hunted mastodons and built cities and stuff, despite not seeming to know enough. We can’t even explain how we know that a sentence is grammatical, though we made up the language ourselves. That intuition is what artificial intelligence, in the form of “deep learning”, has equaled and exceeded. You thought computers were good for knowledge and logic, but that’s backwards; humans are weak at knowledge and logic, but they’re the skills keeping us ahead.