Parallel processing in artificial intelligence

Intelligence, whether in a machine or in a living creature, is a mixture of many abilities. Our current artificial intelligence (AI) technology does a good job of emulating some aspects of human intelligence, generally those things that, when they are done by people, seem to be serial and conscious. AI is very far from being able to match other human abilities, generally those things that seem to happen “in a flash” and without any feeling of sustained mental effort. We are left with an unbalanced technology that is powerful enough to be of real commercial value, but that is very far from exhibiting intelligence in any broad, human-like sense of the word. It is ironic that AI’s successes have come in emulating the specialized performance of human experts, and yet we cannot begin to approach the common sense of a five-year-old child or the sensory abilities and physical coordination of a rat.