TECHNOLOGY: Noble laureate says robot intuition will exceed that of humans

Machines are already developing intuition and humans should be clearly in charge of the principles that govern the programming of those devices, said Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman.

Speaking at the 7thWorld Government Summit, in Dubai, the Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University believes that robots will soon exceed human ability to develop intuition.

“We have a brain and it operates beautifully, but whatever this brain does, there is going to be machinery that is going to match it and exceed it,” he said.

Asked about intuition and how this differentiates people from machines, Kahneman said that nobody wants to accept that machines are going to be better than people at everything, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to specify what people are necessarily better at than machines.

He added that if machines are given sufficient data, they will develop their own intuition that will be better than human intuition. “This is already happening,” he said.

Kahneman also pointed out that emotional intelligence, that is the ability to predict how people are going to behave, will certainly be a domain in which machines are going to be better at than people. 

He explained that a robot looking at people’s facial expressions learns to predict their next behaviour. At the same time, this robot feeds what it has learned at a central computer that learns from thousands of robots.  

“No individual can acquire the kind of experience that robots will very quickly acquire.”

The 2002 Noble prize winner in Economic Sciences also spoke about the factors that affect human decision making.

“The self confidence that comes with intuition is not to be trusted. You can be extremely confident and wrong.”  

He added that the correlation between confidence and accuracy is generally not very high.

Kahneman advised instead that people apply discipline in their thinking. “This means delaying intuition.” 

“Do not have early intuitions, delay them until you have enough information and until you have been objectively informed about all the facts.”