About this episode

Douglas Guilbeault discusses the limitations of AI compared to human intelligence and the processes involved in human learning.

“Humans manage to do so much with surprisingly little,” says Douglas Guilbeault , an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Whereas AI, by comparison, is doing relatively little, but with so much power, so much compute, so many resources, and by comparison, relatively fewer constraints.” On a bonus episode of the If/Then podcast, Guilbeault describes the implications of his recent work. Although he readily acknowledges that AI is “increasingly able to do quite a lot,” Guilbeault and his colleagues believe they have identified a key principle that distinguishes human intelligence from machine intelligence — and one which illuminates the limitations of machine thinking.  Although some researchers and AI boosters believe both humans and AI learn via optimization, Guilbeault and his colleagues have shown that another process more accurately captures how people distill the seemingly infinite complexity of the world and act based on limited information.  “You encounter a lot of noise, a lot of chaos, a lot of randomness,” Guilbeault says. “We somehow figure out how to make meaning and establish strong understandings from…

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