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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34813
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Take a very close look at pets.

The main thing about AI is that we cannot imagine **at all** how it would be or think. We can imagine someone being smarter than us **along the same line** , but not someone smarter in a completely different way.

That is why you should look at pets.

I have two cats, and typically I falsely assume that they live in the same world as I do. But they don't. When I come home, one of them spends half a minute sniffing me out, and in that time she probably learns more about my day then I could say in half an hour. This morning, a neighbour cat walked on the yard, and one of our cats smelled it through a closed door. Animals in the wild can smell prey **kilometers away**.

But on the other side, our cats still can't figure out how simple things in the house work. They know how to open and close doors, but a light switch is beyond their comprehension.

An AI would be easily as different from us as we are from our pets. If you want to illustrate that it is not human, you should focus on that.

Which senses does it have that we don't? Does it have access to your version of the Internet? How would life be if you could instantly fact-check every new information against a dozen online databases? If that process would be so automated that you do it subconsciously?

Like with our pets, it would work both ways. The AI would be able to do things that are incomprehensible to humans. If you stand in front of a supermarket and ask it to buy some milk, it would turn the other way, cross the street, enter a small shop there and come back out with a bottle of milk. Because it did a background database check and knew that the supermarket was out, and the small shop has the lowest price within walking distance. But it would not even understand this reason, if you ask why it would look the same puzzled as we look when hitting a light switch - because that is how you turn on the light. Because that is how you buy milk. **We** follow the immediate visual clue of the supermarket sign. **It** follows its online database information. For the AI, an online search is no more difficult than looking around.

On the other hand, it would not understand why price tags show a total price as well as a price per kg. Or a price with tax. Why do you need that information spelled out explicitly if calculating it on-the-fly is a millisecond background process? It's like writing "white wall" on every white wall.

The non-human part of an AI is not that it thinks faster. That is just more of the same. The real non-human part is where it is not superior, but **different**.

Original score: 3