34 | New Scientist | 5 March 2022
Views Culture
Book
How to Stay Smart in
a Smart World: Why
human intelligence
still beats algorithms
Gerd Gigerenzer
Allen LaneIN THE 1950s, Herbert Simon –
a political scientist and one of
the founders of AI – declared that,
once a computer could beat the
best chess player in the world,
machines would have reached the
pinnacle of human intelligence.
Just a few decades later, in 1997,
the chess-playing computer
Deep Blue beat world champion
Garry Kasparov.
It was an impressive feat, but
according to Gerd Gigerenzer,
a psychologist at the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development
in Berlin, human minds don’t
need to worry just yet. In How to
Stay Smart in a Smart World, he
unpacks humanity’s complicated
relationship with artificial
intelligence and digital
technology. In an age where
self-driving cars have been let
loose on the roads, smart homes
can anticipate and cater for our
every need and websites seem to
know our preferences better than
we do, people tend to “assume
the near-omniscience of artificial
intelligence”, says Gigerenzer.
But, he argues, AIs aren’t as clever
as you might think.
A 2015 study, for example,
showed that even the smartest
object-recognition system is easily
fooled, confidently classifying
meaningless patterns as objects
with more than 99 per cent
confidence. And at the 2017 UEFA
Champions League final in Cardiff,
UK, a face-recognition system
matched the faces of 2470 football
fans at the stadium and the city’srailway station to those of known
criminals. This would have been
useful but for 92 per cent of the
matches turning out to be false
alarms, despite the system being
designed to be both more efficient
and more reliable than humans.
There are good reasons why
even the smartest systems fail,
says Gigerenzer. Unlike chess,
which has rules that are rigid and
unchanging, the world of humans
is squishy and inconsistent. In
the face of real-world uncertainty,
algorithms fall apart.
Here, we get to the crux of
Gigerenzer’s main argument:
technology, at least as we know it
today, could never replace humans
because there is no algorithm
for common sense. Knowing,
but not truly understanding,
leaves AI in the dark about
what is really important.
Obviously, technology can
be, and often is, useful. The voice
and face-recognition software
on smartphones are largely
convenient and the fact thattechnology users also need to
change our relationship with it.
Rather than treating technology
with unflinching awe or suspicion,
we must cultivate a healthy dose
of scepticism, he says. In an age
where we seem to accept the rise
of social media addiction, regular
privacy breaches and the spread
of misinformation as unavoidable
downsides of internet use – even
when they cause significant harm
to society – it is perhaps time we
took stock and reconsidered.
Using personal anecdotes,
cutting-edge research and
cautionary real-world tales,
Gigerenzer deftly explains the
limits and dangers of technology
and AI. Occasionally, he uses
extreme examples for the sake
of making a point, and in places
he blurs the lines between digital
technology, smart technology,
algorithms and AI, which muddies
the waters. Nevertheless, the
overall message of Gigerenzer’s
book still stands: in a world that
increasingly relies on technology
to make it function, human
discernment is vital “to make
the digital world a world we
want to live in”. ❚YouTube seems to know what
I want to watch saves the hassle
of working it out for myself. Yet
even if smart technology is mostly
helpful, and is showing few signs
of replacing us, Gigerenzer argues
that we should still be aware of the
dangers it can pose to our society.Digital technology has created
an economy that trades on the
exchange of personal data, which
can be used against our best
interests. Companies and political
parties can purchase targeted
adverts that subtly influence
our online shopping choices
and, even more nefariously,
how we vote. “One might call
this turn to an ad-based business
model the ‘original sin’ of the
internet,” writes Gigerenzer.
So, what can be done?
Gigerenzer says that more
transparency from tech firms
and advertisers is vital. ButST
ANHONDA/AFP^
VIAGETT
Y^ IMAG
ESBattle of the smarts
In a world where artificial intelligence seems to be ready to take over,
human common sense is far from obsolete, finds Chen LyDeep Blue’s algorithms
beat chess champion
Garry Kasparov in 1997“ Knowing, but not truly
understanding, leaves
artificial intelligence
in the dark about what
is really important”