Man's Mind Versus Machine Mind

That contest between the two top Jeopardy (a game of the recall of facts) contestants of all time and a computer called 'Watson' that was built specifically to see who is the real champ of information recall, brings up quite a few questions. The main being the long time, "Are computers smarter than people"? Watson won easily, but it was, after all, just quick recall of facts. It should be no surprise that a computer (created and programmed by man, more specifically, by an IBM team of 25 scientists in three years time) would recall faster than a human brain. Fortunately for mankind, intelligence is more that than regurgitation of factual information.

While computers can calculate and construct, they cannot decide to create. So far, only humans can. And that is the distinction between man and machine. Humans think, emote, and create. machines only think (and only the way they have been programmed to do so). Humans have the kind of intelligence that writes poetry and music, falls in love, sacrifices for loved ones, behaves enigmatically and on and on. Humans are interesting, machines are reliable but predictable and un exciting (Haha unless one is a cell phone addict and has crossed the boundary and is unable to distinguish humanity from his or her phone).

So given all of that humans are surely "smarter" than their created machines. The intelligence humans possess is a different kind than can (at least for now) be programmed into machines. It is self contained in each human and not one dependent on outside connections as computers are. This is why the variation in intelligence levels among humans is far greater than what is found in computers. Machine intelligence varies from computer to computer very little.

What Watson really proves to us is that humans are still the more important intelligence on earth. All the computers in the world can't create the love a parent has for a child, for instance. And if one ever did it would have ceased to be a machine anymore.