Human beings, courtesy of the gift of cognition, are capable of creating reusable
data, information, knowledge from simple or complex observations
in an abstract realm. A machine on the other hand can only discover
and infere based on a substrate of structured and interlinked data,
information, or knowledge in a concrete human created realm
e.g., a Web of Linked Data.
As is quite common these days,
Yihong
Ding has written another great piece titled:
A New Take on Internet-Based AI, that
delves into this specific matter. Yihong expresses an vital insight
as excerpted below:
"Artificial intelligence is supposed to let
machines do things for people. The risk is that we may rely too
much on them. Two months ago, for instance, writer Nicolas Carr
asked whether Google is making us stupid. In my recent
blog series "The Age of Google," I extended Carr’s
discussion. Due to the success of Google, we are relying more on
objective search than on active thinking to answer questions. In
consequence, the more Google has advanced its service, the farther
Google users have drifted from active
thinking."
"But at least one form of human thinking cannot
be replaced by machines. I am not talking about inference/discovery
(which machines may be capable of doing) but about
creation/generation-from-nothing (which I don’t believe machines
may ever do)."
I tend to describe our ability to create/generate-from-nothing
as "Zero-based Cognition", which is initially about "thought" and
the eventually about "speed of thought dissemination" and "global
thought meshing".
In a peculiar sense, Zero-based cognition is analogous to
Zero-based budgeting from the accounting
realm :-)