Tech leaders will keep talking up the smartness of AI but chimps may beg to differ for good reason

Tech leaders obsessively compare human intelligence with the latest AI systems. Many people claim that once these systems surpass us in intelligence, they will enslave us, destroy us, or solve all our problems.

How can we compare human and machine intelligence when we can’t decide which species is more intelligent? Scientists who study human or animal behaviour and brainpower tend to break intelligence down into abilities they can actually measure.

What impressed them was a recent paper providing experimental evidence that chimpanzees can use reasoning to weigh different strengths of evidence, draw rational conclusions, update beliefs, and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their own knowledge.

This finding refutes centuries of philosophy that equated reason with human uniqueness. “It’s the strongest evidence yet that we share the planet with another rational being," said Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare. The significance isn’t in measuring the level of chimp intelligence, but in understanding how our animal relatives think.

Intelligence is a little like the concept of nobility, said Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Nobility is a social construct that conflates social status with positive character traits. It’s been used for centuries to justify the hoarding of power and wealth. Gopnik explained that intelligence is often seen as a mysterious magical substance people are born with in varying quantities.

“It’s this really funny kind of folk idea, and it’s very prevalent among AI researchers," she said, “and it doesn’t make any sense from the cognitive science perspective."

What does make sense, she said, is the latest evidence showing that animals can reason. The researchers worked with orphaned chimps rescued from the wild, living at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda. Participation was voluntary—between 15 and 23 eager subjects participated.

The chimpanzees were asked to choose between two canisters that might contain a treat, such as apple slices. In some cases, the researchers used a transparent window to let the chimps see where the treats were, while in others, they shook the containers so the animals could hear whether anything was inside.

Sometimes the researchers would add, remove or alter evidence, then give the chimps a chance to change their minds. In one case, they even presented the chimps with ‘fake news’—a picture of fruit instead of the real thing. The chimps discounted the false evidence, recalled other clues and used them to get the correct answer.

Many animals update their beliefs through learning, said Gopnik, but this experiment demonstrated something new; the animals were not just learning but weighing evidence, both new and remembered. And they combined all that information to decide whether they had good reason to change their minds. That requires what Gopnik calls meta-cognition—the ability to evaluate what they know and what they don’t. Hare agreed that chimps were demonstrating metacognition—to succeed in the task, the animals had to reflect on what they didn’t know.

Last week, Science reported that ChatGPT and similar systems are programmed to lack strong meta-cognition. These systems often give confidently incorrect answers rather than admitting they don’t know. The training, as Science reported, is designed to “reward confident guesses and penalize honest uncertainty."

If intelligence is like nobility, that doesn’t mean it’s non-existent, but rather that it’s subjective. Chatbots might have superhuman language skills and instant access to vast amounts of accumulated human knowledge, but they lack curiosity and the probabilistic logic that’s critical for sound judgment. And with all their overconfidence and sycophancy on display, they are proving to be somewhat ignoble.

Perhaps the reason we’re so obsessed with ranking intelligence is that such behaviour is instinctive for hierarchical primates like us. We’re driven to equate higher rank with dominance, so it feels natural to assume that if intelligence determines rank, and AI climbs above us, it will dominate—or even drive us to extinction.

That’s what we have come close to doing to chimpanzees. But then, destroying or crowding out animals that have so much to teach us about ourselves is not all that intelligent. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science.