MUMBAI - Half a year before ChatGPT drove artificial intelligence (AI) into the consciousnesses of the average human, Blake Lemoine, a Google developer chatting with his company’s LaMDA large language model had an epiphany. The answers LaMDA gave to questions of morality, self-awareness, and religion convinced him in June 2022 that AI was a thing with consciousness.

News media worldwide quickly declared that AI was having its Frankenstein ‘It’s alive!’ moment. However, one going beyond the headlines and asking anyone who has looked under the hood of AI well will be quick to point out that this assertion is patently stupid. In hardware terms, there is not even an iota of difference between a normal computer and an AI system.

The main difference lies in the ‘how’ of its processing capabilities. Lemoine was simply saying that if one simply changes the ‘how’ of processing - not even the arrangement - one can make every digital device, mobile phone, and computer in the world come alive. Still, as this debate pans out, one thing is becoming clear: It is not that AI that has turned smart, but rather that humans are leaving their intelligence at the altar of their fear, anthropomorphism, and downright opportunism and xenophobia. This means that the very premise ‘When AI outsmarts Humans’ is a ludicrous oxymoron. AI will never ever outsmart humans, and the reason for this is simple: AI has no concept of what ‘smartness’ even is, nor does it ‘know’ or ‘understand’ what ‘intelligence’ is. So why do people keep saying that? The question that should really be examined here is not ‘when AI outsmarts humans,’ but rather: Why have humans suddenly begun attributing human qualities to a thing that has already been in use for three-quarters of a century?

Pinnacle of computing

The concept of logic gates that makes up the basis of computing and AI is ancie