Advances in Human-AI Collaboration

5Human Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence

Peiran Liu and Denny Yu

Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

5.1 Characterizing Similarities and Differences Today

5.1.1 Historical Perspectives of Human Intelligence

Early work on human thought has had key influences from the era of Plato (see Figure 5.1), who contributed to the philosophical foundations for understanding intelligence (Bennett, 1999). Early on, the concept remained highly abstract, without formal or standardized measures such as IQ tests or benchmarks to quantify human intelligence. Plato viewed intelligence as an innate quality closely related to reasoning abilities, a perspective that remains relevant in current discussions of intelligence (Palanca-Castan et al., 2021). Even now, enhancing reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) is a frontier discipline in AI research, and reasoning is a key component of improving models’ performance. Plato further divided intelligence into two forms of reasoning: discursive and intuitive. Discursive reasoning is referred to as a tool of dialectics, for instance, the logic behind mathematical proofs. In contrast, intuitive reasoning relies on intrinsic insight without the deduction steps.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, John Locke introduced the idea of the “tabula rasa” (blank slate) in knowledge-based intelligence, in which people are born as a blank slate mentally, without any prebuilt content (Meyers, 2014 ...