Who Teaches Artificial Intelligence?

The Experience of Asian Countries

The recent debate on the disruptive transformations that artificial intelligence (AI) could bring to the economic, social, and political systems in which we live often assesses risks and opportunities based on superficial observations. For example, it is certainly true that new AIs like ChatGPT4 or Gemini have processing capabilities thousands of times superior to the average human intelligence, but those results are exclusively due to how the AIs have been trained.

For instance, Gemini (Google's AI) has read and memorized 40 million books, all written by human intelligences, and knows more than 200 languages. Education is therefore the key to better understanding complex issues. In fact, even for human intelligences, the quality of education and intelligence quotients (IQ) are practically two sides of the same coin. This is one of the most enlightening "discoveries" of the global report on human intelligence, "The Intelligence of Nations," conducted by researchers Richard Lynn and David Becker of the Ulster Institute, which is the most cited by scholars.

The report explains some of the main reasons why Asian peoples occupy all the top six positions in the world ranking of national intelligence quotients. Some exceptional individuals with very high IQs, towards or above 140, can emerge in any country, but it is education that raises the average intelligence of all others.

Due to the diversity of factors considered in measuring IQ, the world IQ ranking is not a model accepted by all researchers, unlike other indicators of social development. While IQ is a common measure of intelligence, other metrics include academic test scores, or the Intelligence Capital Index and the number of Nobel Prizes won in each country. Only Singapore and Finland consistently appear in all three IQ rankings.

School tests are more "scientific," but they represent only the average intelligence of the younger generation, not that of the adult population. According to these studies, about 68% of people worldwide have an IQ between 85 and 115. Since very few people with low IQ become researchers and publish scientific research and books, artificial intelligences have the advantage of being trained based on knowledge developed exclusively by human intelligences with high IQs. Furthermore, the few Western books of extremist opinions based on fake news are rarely translated into Asian languages and thus have no effect on the formation of artificial intelligences.

Sandro Calvani

NP Marzo 2024