Humans in Intelligent Environment: Near Future

For hundreds of thousands of years since the appearance of humans on the face of Earth, humans have been interacting with their environment. The interactions have always been either with living species such as other humans or organisms from other species such as dogs and cats and horses and cows and bulls and so on, as well as trees. Humans have also been interacting with non-living objects such as rocks and soil and water, etc. When humans interact with living species (except probably trees), they always expect some form of active response in return. If we run after a dog, it might run away or may come back charging at us. If we talk with another human, they may talk back or laugh or get scared, etc. Humans are accustomed to such responses. The interaction with trees can be a bit tricky. With no locomotive organs, most of the interaction may seem like one with non-living things, but we can observe that trees grow from seeds, they shed leaves in fall and grow back in spring, they bear flowers and fruits, etc. In general, though, responses to non-living things are always passive in nature. If you hit a rock, you will get hurt, but the rock is not going to actively respond in any way. Also, when left alone, the rock is not going to show any changes to its appearance. Same applies to all the other non-living things. This is what has been programmed into human brains since eternity. It started to change a little with the introduction of machines into their lives around 7000 years ago as we saw in earlier chapters. These machines were capable of moving things and reacting to human actions in a way that was different than a typical non-living thing, but it was still quite deterministic and predictable. There was no element of surprise or uncertainty in their behavior and humans quickly adapted to work with such machines. For thousands of years from then till the late twentieth century, these interactions were still about the same in spite of vast improvements in the type of machines and their capabilities. The machines were still quite deterministic and predictable. They were still not unpredictable, and no original or intelligent response would be expected from them. The definition of intelligence is deeply rooted in the behavior of living species that come with uncertainty and unpredictability along with logical thinking. As the machine technology reached a point where they started outsmarting humans in complex heuristic calculations (still quite deterministic and predictable) in the form of expert systems, an inevitable comparison with human intelligence started to surface. However, with reference to the notion of human-like intelligence, the machines were still rather dumb.