The Most Powerful AI is in Your Head

It's Called Intuition

The world’s most powerful AI is not sitting in some data center connected to a web of parallel processing NVIDIA chips feasting on obscene amounts of energy. No, it is sitting inside of your head, and it’s way better than artificial intelligence.

It’s natural intelligence and it’s called intuition.

Comparing the two would be like pitting artificial crab meat to some of the best Florida stone crab meat (if you’ve never tried that yet, put it on your bucket list). Simply put, your mind is the most powerful pattern recognition machine on the planet and the surprising thing is many of choose to avoid using that power.

But why is this?

Before we go there, we should first line up the similarities between how AI and our brains function. Then, we will go over how they differ. Which will then lead us to why our minds are superior pattern recognition machines that happen to be biological and why we hesitate to harness it. Finally, we will close with how to leverage the capability of intuition and set you on a path to prosperity.

Similarities between AI and our minds

The saying is, if you trust the AI, then you trust the data. If you have any doubts, just take a look at this table:

Two things should stand out: (i) AI is not new and has been around for decades, and more importantly, (ii) even though the algorithms have been around for over a decade on average, once the data became available, it only took an average of three years for the AI breakthrough to occur.

Humanity has only recently figured out how to digitize - or convert our analogue environment into numbers - and store the data at scale. Couple that with the developments in computing through CPUs and then GPUs, and we have the AI acceleration boom we are going through today.

Our bodies, which are machines as well that just happen to be biological in nature, have been accomplishing the same thing - except in much higher fidelity. Unlike the AI machines, we have additional data through our five basic senses - for example, there is not much touch, taste, or smell information that has been digitized and fed into AI models today, simply because we don’t have the instruments to convert the information into numbers at scale (e.g. mass mobile phone cameras taking pictures around the world for visual data).

Since our birth, we have been fed data through our senses as our brains develop, with close and intimate management through our parents, family members, and close friends. Like AI models, we have learning practices that evolve over time as we develop into adults.

In effect, we are the organic machine blueprint that we are attempting to replicate in the mechanical and electrical realms.

Differences between AI and our minds

We’ve already established that the data coming into our brains has more dimensions, including information such as touch and taste.

However, the critical differences don’t just lie in the data itself, but rather, in how the data is consumed. Firstly, the data fed into our brains is not a smorgasboard uploaded in brute fashion - rather, as we live our lives, we experience everything in context of the situation we are in, and it is this meta layer of information that ties the data being fed into our brains. This contextual meta layer cannot be synthesized - the only way to generate it is, well, to live life!

And this is the key point: it is only through the experience of living life that we seal in the streams of data - which are all connected with each other and not randomly disparate bits jumbled together - that gives birth to what we call “General Intelligence” - the elusive level of intelligence that Google, OpenAI, Facebook and the usual suspects are searching for all the wrong reasons.

Our feelings have a purpose, and it is an incredibly important one: to seal in the contextual information along with the data that is coming into our minds. There is no such thing in machines today as I type.

The existing methods today of uploading gargantuan amounts of data - currently limited to text, video, images, and audio - and then extracting “intelligence” through various learning algorithms have no contextual information. They are calculating the best prediction of “what comes next” and because the output is in human communication channels such as speech, text, images, and videos, we are amazed. In this sense, I agree with Yan Lecun that LLM AI models of today, such as ChatGPT, will never reach human-level general intelligence.

The current approach is flawed if we want to get to Artificial General Intelligence, and no amount of data and processing power will finesse it to succeed.

By the way, I find it hugely irresponsible of us to jam the entire internet, full of vicious and insidious content from platforms like Reddit, and use it to “train” AI models that clearly are not at the level of human adults. We take so much care to rear our children and feed them limited information because they won’t be able to understand how to process it, yet we upload the internet to these models and expect something good? And these models are supposed to change everyone’s lives?

To make matters worse, the internet we feed is a biased internet, so we end up with all sorts of embarrassing situations and hush them away as “hallucinations.”

Our superior minds

We’ve established that AI can create knowledge from information, and reams and reams of it. Yet, it lacks the experience of living life, and thus attempts to synthesize this critical piece of information by sifting through data in search of patterns to reconstruct experiences behind the data.

However, our minds can go beyond the experience stage that AI has issues establishing. There are the strategy and intuition levels of thinking we possess that are beyond mere experiential thinking.

You may think that AI can already generate strategies, look at Chess and AlphaGo, or what ChatGPT can do. Sorry to burst your bubble but games have a rigid and set set of rules, but that is not the way life works - it is full of almost infinite and changing dynamic parameters. And what ChatGPT simulates is the best “textbook” answer it can muster no matter how good your “prompt engineering” skills are. It is not distilled down to you particular life, situation and nuances involved because - there are no two exact same setups in life. Sure, life may rhyme, but it doesn’t repeat verbatim.

Application is key.

Finally, we have the last stage which is intuition. This is the most advanced form of decision making and people who have mastered how to use it in the right circumstances can make high fidelity decisions quickly. It is the culmination of all the data, contextual and emotive processing, and pattern recognition resulting from our life experiences. Note how I said emotive processing - this is key, because that is why intuition has a “feel” to it. It is not one-dimensional, but multi-dimensional.

Emotions are used to sear in the data, and guess what, emotions are also used when generating intuition from the data. It’s bi-directional. In common language, we call this “listening to your gut.”

How to use your intuition

Put simply, use your intuition - listen to your gut - when dealing with a domain or space that you have a lot of experience and a wealth of knowledge in. You have captured and sealed in with emotions a lot of data which will lead to intuitive capabilities, allowing you to short-cut yourself to the best decision your mind can make.

The danger is, to use what you think is your intuition - but might just be emotion without the knowledge - in the wrong context. So what is the wrong context? Any domain that you don’t have experience in and are a newbie to. You haven’t collected enough information, don’t have the context, and don’t possess the pattern recognition ability to have solid intuition.

You may just be mistaking your emotional fight-or-flight judgement mechanism initiated by your amygdala as intuition. That is not intuition, that is survival skills that our cavemen ancestors honed so that we didn’t go extinct when living with sabre-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths.

For information on this, check out this video where I discuss this topic in further detail:

Remember, just because science can’t fully explain something doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist. That’s why we have unexplainable phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy - it’s there, we just can’t measure it or explain why it exists or how it works. Those are the known unknowns.

Trust me, there are unknown unknowns.

Intuition is an ability. It is an immensely powerful ability. Don’t write it off because we are not yet able to fully detail how it works. Instead, leverage it and use it in the right circumstances to achieve your goals in life!