Understanding Human Intelligence through Human Limitations

TL;DR

This paper explores human intelligence by analyzing how fundamental limitations in time, computation, and communication shape its unique characteristics, offering insights into differences from artificial intelligence.

Contribution

It introduces a framework linking human cognitive limitations to key properties of human intelligence, providing a new perspective on its nature and development.

Findings

Human intelligence is shaped by three core limitations: time, computation, and communication.

These limitations explain rapid learning and problem decomposition in humans.

The framework accounts for cultural evolution and other human-specific cognitive traits.

Abstract

Recent progress in artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to ask the question of what is unique about human intelligence, but with a new comparison class. I argue that we can understand human intelligence, and the ways in which it may differ from artificial intelligence, by considering the characteristics of the kind of computational problems that human minds have to solve. I claim that these problems acquire their structure from three fundamental limitations that apply to human beings: limited time, limited computation, and limited communication. From these limitations we can derive many of the properties we associate with human intelligence, such as rapid learning, the ability to break down problems into parts, and the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution.