Humans and machines have traditionally had clearly defined areas of expertise. We have the ideas, and they do the dangerous, complicated or boring parts. If we write a poem, a computer can check the spelling, but it can’t write the poem in the first place.
Or can it? Computers are getting better at things we’ve always thought were uniquely human abilities, from writing prose and understanding music to evaluating artworks.
To understand why, you need to know a little about how the two differ. We specialise in recognising abstracts and patterns, filtering everything through emotion to give it context. All computers can really do is add up, and even though they’re getting better and faster at it, we shouldn’t mistake ever-faster computing with intelligence.
Click here to read the rest of this story.