Celestial Koan would absolutely NOT say that intelligence is just a matter of pattern recognition.

I would say that pattern recognition is just one specific intelligence.

Alright - there are many different types of pattern. Visual patterns. Auditory patterns. Sensory patterns. Story / narrative patterns. Word patterns. So maybe ten specific forms of intelligence. Maybe thirty.

It appears, from the way AI is developing, that General Intelligence consists of perhaps a thousand different types of specific intelligence, plus some overall master algorithm that determines which types of intelligence to apply to a problem and what to do with the results. So far AI has developed perhaps 500 of these 1000 specific intelligence algorithms.

And pattern recognition amount to perhaps 30 of them.

Pattern recognition is probably one of the easier specific intelligences for AI to tackle, and I’m pretty confident that AI could blitz pattern recognition. I’m not aware of what AI has already tackled in this area. I am aware that AI looks for specific patterns in such things as biological analysis of samples and DNA and does it very well. It also does extensive pattern recognition in human faces, and already has over 80% success rate in determining a male who is gay from facial features alone. Pretty good pattern recognition.

I consider pattern recognition to be a fairly trivial specific intelligence skill, and one in which brute force algorithms will probably score very well. Not a good test of general intelligence.

Pattern recognition in somewhat beloved of IQ testers because it has the advantage of being relatively culturally unbiased. There also happens to be a reasonable correlation between performance skills in pattern recognition and IQ measures in other areas. This is useful for testing IQ in Humans, but may simply be a fluke for our species, or our current educational system. It may also be a flaw in the way we measure IQ in humans.

I would say the real tests of IQ are originality. How many people can come up with truly original stories like Terry Pratchett? How many people could paint as Van Gogh or Renoir did, never before having seen any painting like it? How many people could have written Principia Mathematica?

The problem is, there is simply no way to measure the IQ involved in what Van Gogh did. He sold other people’s paintings to the artistic cognoscenti for a living, but only managed to sell one of his own paintings in his life time. Even the ‘cognoscenti’ weren’t smart enough to recognise his genius. So how can one evaluate his IQ?

Which leads to the issue - it’s very difficult to define what intelligence is, let alone measure it. Siri, Cortana etc. respond to tens thousands of voice requests simultaneously, in dozens of different languages with thousands of different accents, and mostly produce useful responses. Could any human do anything like that? How many languages can most humans converse in? So what is the IQ of Siri or Cortana.

In terms of the specific intelligences involved - it’s way off the human scale. In terms of General Intelligence, since AI has not yet developed General Intelligence, it tells us only one thing. When AI does develop General Intelligence, expect it to be off the scale better than humans. When AI plays Chess it beats all humans. When AI plays GO it beats all humans. When AI masters a specific intelligence skill it eventually beats all humans. So - expect the same when it finally masters General Intelligence.

But what shapes intelligence? Good question.

To which we can add a few others:

Is consciousness or self awareness a necessary or even useful feature of General Intelligence?

How does one measure the intelligence of autistic savants?

Will AI end up being somewhat like the autistic savants?

Why do human beings like creating, telling, and listening to stories? Is this a feature of intelligence, or just a human idiosyncrasy?

Our Western education system does a good job of shoving information into our intellect. I don’t think it does a very good job of teaching us about our mind, consciousness, or how to use it properly. In fact, I suspect it screws us up as human beings.

My mother taught first year reception intake at school for many years. She told me that in less than a week she could tell which children would have no trouble with education regardless of the system, the teacher, the grading system or whatever. By age five their brain was already functioning fine. She spent most of her time with the children at the other end of the spectrum, trying to make sure they learnt enough basics not to drop out of the schooling system altogether.

I watch my smart grand-neices and grand-nephews, ages 6 to 1 at this stage. They will all measure out above 150 on an IQ test some day. But I also see the thousands of hours of patient tuition they have already received in a thousand different specific intelligence skills from their smart, trained, and excellent parents. And yes - they were hearing music and voices within the womb itself.

What shapes intelligence?

A neural network?

Fifty thousand different gifted programmers, developers etc.

A million hours of patient teaching by parents and teachers and others?

Some specific genes?

How do autistic savants do what they do? What’s different in their brains?

More questions than answers, I’m afraid.

But at least they are good questions.

Asking the right questions is often helpful to finding the right answers.

Pattern recognition is undoubtedly an essential feature of intelligence. And neural nets and genetic algorithms are very good at pattern recognition problems. But it’s still only one smallish aspect of General Intelligence.

And we don’t have all the answers to the larger problem yet.

If we did we’d do eduction smarter, have more geniuses, higher average IQ, and possibly Generally Intelligent AI already.

Hope these thoughts help.