The excerpt of Daston’s Rules was illuminating for me, as it articulated a clear approach towards the relationship and nuance between human and machine intelligence. I was particularly touched by the following two lines:

“The inference drawn from the capacity of machines to calculate was not that machines were intelligent but rather that at least some intelligence was mechanical, in the sense of being mindless. But it was a peculiar sort of mindlessness, one that required the utmost efforts of attention and memory.” (p. 135)

The self-reflection of human intelligence upon itself may prove to be, in the long run, even more important and revolutionary than the delegation of more and more, and harder and harder, mental and intellectual tasks to machines. In order to make a mental task mechanical, and thus mindless, we must first be intensely mindful of the step-by-step processes, or rules, of which it is composed. In doing so, we may discover new ways of thinking about old problems, just as the mechanization of arithmetic inspired new algorithms and new ways of adding and multiplying numbers which are vastly different from the way that humans perform arithmetic. The calculation of numbers is an age-old mental task, as commonly used as it is daunting. For most, as soon as the numbers get beyond two digits, calculation requires significant attention and mental exertion. With that being said, calculation has also become, with the aid of computation machines, a trivial task. The brightest minds no longer spend much time and energy doing it, and, as Daston notes, are no longer judged based on their performance of it. It is clear that whatever calculation is, it does not hold the essence of intelligence. What other mental processes can we mechanize as such, thereby bringing us that much closer to what intelligence really is? Just as with science, where the more we know, the more questions we have, the more we try to make intelligence mindless and mechanizable, the more we discover new forms of intellectual activity, thus redefining the realm of human intelligence.

It seems to me that there is a huge class of mental activity which is characteristic of the attention and memory-demanding task of calculation. Indeed, much of scientific and mathematical thinking seem to be highly related to it. Grossly simplifying, they tend to require a search through the memory of certain facts, and of certain relations between facts, and the following through of such relations, or inductions, until some result is arrived at. It is rigorous, it is mentally exerting, and it can be broken down into smaller, accountable steps. At no point in the performance of these mental tasks does one have to look up at the sky and wait, like an artist, for some unaccountable divine inspiration to hit. It is thus quite bizarre to me that the Logic Theorist has not evolved to become capable of proving at least all existing mathematical theorems. It raises the question of just how universally valid and rigorous the “rules” which govern our sciences, and especially our mathematics, really are. It also leads one to wonder how scientists and mathematicians have achieved so much. If what they do is just a well-orchestrated exertion of attention and memory, then why has it not been mechanized like calculation? If it is not just a matter of attention of memory, then what is it that separates their intellectual ability? What does the creativity of a scientist or mathematician consist of? Hopefully, by chipping away at the parts of their mental processes which can be mechanized, we may get closer to answering this question.