Is AI smarter than us?
Before we decide whether AI is smarter than us, we should agree on what “smart” even means. We usually understand smartness in the context of a specific task: a smart taxi driver finds the fastest route, a smart football player tricks the goalkeeper, and a smart lawyer spots the loophole that wins the case.
To get a sense of this, we can look at a domain where machines might have the edge over humans - chess could be one such example.
When Deep Blue won its first series of matches against Garry Kasparov in 1997, the victory didn’t go without controversy. Kasparov and many chess analysts claimed that the computer had been updated between matches, giving it an unfair advantage. IBM never put an end to these speculations, so even today we are not entirely sure whether Kasparov lost to a pure machine or to a human–machine hybrid.
Modern programs have advanced to the point where facing humans in competition is almost meaningless. To put this into perspective, a chess player’s skill is measured using the ELO rating system — for context, the highest-rated human ever, Magnus Carlsen, reached a peak of 2882 points. Today’s engines can outperform humans by more than 1000 ELO points, making them stronger than any human who has ever lived.
But is this really new? Even in the past, calculators could outperform humans — not only 20th-century electronic calculators, but even mechanical ones from the 19th century and earlier. Electronic calculators outperform humans because they can perform a huge number of micro-operations per second. Chess, despite having relatively few rules, offers an enormous number of possible paths to victory. This makes the goal of winning easy for a computer to define, and thanks to their enormous computational power, computers can calculate far more combinations in a short time than any human player.
In conclusion, AI might be smarter than humans in certain tasks, especially those requiring calculation. But this doesn’t mean AI will soon make human intelligence or the workforce obsolete — just as calculators didn’t make mathematicians redundant, powerful chess engines haven’t made chess an obsolete game.