Il metodo scientifico impone al cervello un esercizio austero, direi quasi spartano. Nella migliore delle ipotesi consente piccoli progressi. La gioia della grande scoperta è qualcosa di rarissimo e riservato a poche persone, e anche queste poche persone non è che possano ripetere Eureka molte volte. È naturale quindi che perfino gli scienziati siano tentati di allontanarsi dalla via della razionalità e di imboccare altre vie più comode per raggiungere la verità.

What are the primary, most important, or most limiting resources that human civilization depends on? Material resources are certainly significant. We need to build our civilization out of something, and we always seem to be facing a crisis of “peak” whatever—peak oil or peak helium—as our demand for a resource begins to outstrip our supplies. Land is also in limited supply. There is only so much land on Earth on which to grow our food, build our homes, and contain our industries. It would also be nice to leave some land for the other 10 million or so species that we share the planet with. I would argue, however, that the primary resource, the one resource to rule them all, is ideas. With science and technology, we have, so far, been able to overcome all our other resource limitations.

Historically, AI research has been informed by an anthropocentric notion of intelligence. Human intelligence as the point of reference is present in several definitions of AI. For instance, AI has been called “the art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people”24 and “the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.” Similarly, the Merriam Webster dictionary describes AI as “the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.” Indeed, the aim of achieving a likeness between minds and machines was already prevalent among pioneers of AI research, such as Wiener, Turing, and von Neumann.
While human intelligence provides a useful standard of comparison, it is ultimately of limited use. Not only do existing applications of AI already show super-human performance with regard to specific tasks, such as playing and winning at chess, but also, they do not have to function like the human mind, nor do they need to exhibit self-awareness and consciousness to perform tasks that would otherwise require intelligence when done by humans. Furthermore, there can be forms of nonhuman intelligence, as is found in some animals but also in certain phenomena of collective behavior, such as swarm intelligence. Important distinctions can thus be made between a human versus a more general rational standard and between behavioral versus thought-based definitions of intelligence. However, even within these categories it is possible to conceive of intelligence differently, for example in terms of capabilities, functions, or principles. In sum, there is, as Moore has noted, “no general theory of intelligence or learning that unites the discipline.”