There has been much ado over the years about computers becoming as intelligent as humans. Several goals have been set up and surpassed, and for each feat of computer engineering we have learnt that intelligence is a slippery thing that requires ever more refined metrics to accurately measure. Beating a human in chess was once thought a hard thing to do, but then we built a computer that could do it - and very little besides it. It is a very narrowly defined skill being put to the test, and it turns out intelligence is not the key factor that determines victory or defeat.
Fast forward a bit, and we have computers giving trivia nerds a run for their money in Jeopardy. Turns out intelligence isn't the defining factor here either, on both sides. For computers, it's all a matter of being able to crawl through large amounts of available data fast enough to generate a sentence. For humans, it's a matter of having encountered something in the past and being able to recount it in a timely fashion. Similar tasks, indeed. but neither require intelligence. Either the sorting algorithm is optimized enough to get the processing done on time, or it is not. Either you remember that character from that one soap opera you saw years and years ago, or you do not.
The win condition is clearly defined, but the path to fulfilling it does not require intelligence proper. It can go either way, based on what basically amounts to a coin toss, and however you want to go about defining intelligence, that probably is not it.
The question of computers becoming as intelligent as humans has ever so gradually been replaced with an understanding that computers do not have to be. In the case of chess, a specialized dumb computer gets the work done; the same goes for other tasks, with similar degrees of dumb specialization. Get the dumb computer to do it really really way, and the job gets done.
If all you need is a hammer, build a good one.
A more interesting (and more unsettling question) is when a human becomes as intelligent as a human. This might seem somewhat tautological: 1 = 1, after all. Humans are human. But humans have this peculiar quality of being made, not born. As creatures of culture, we have to learn the proper ways to go about living, being and doing, And - more to the point - we can fail to learn these things.
Just what "these things" are is a matter of some debate, and has shifted over the years. A quick way to gauge where the standards are at any moment in time would be to look at the national curricula for the educational system of where you happen to be, and analyze what is given importance and what is not. There are always some things given more attention than others, some aspect promoted above others. And, at the core, some things are deemed to be of such importance that all citizens need to know them. Some minimum of knowledge to be had by all. Some minimum level of intelligence.
And there are always a number of citizens who do not qualify. Who are not, for any given definition of intelligence, up for it.
When does a human become as intelligent as a human?
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