Page 38 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
would make this comparison even simpler. The IQ score is calculated by dividing mental age by chronological age and multiplying this by 100 – thus, an average IQ score is 100, with a standard deviation of 15.
The Binet-Simon IQ test was constructed to measure a variety of cognitive processes, including visual and spatial processing, fluid reasoning, working and short-
achieved by other race groups – was proof of superior genes. The assumption that was made was that a low IQ score indicated inherently low levels of intelligence – rather than a lack of access to education, the foreignness of the IQ testing process, low English proficiency or unfamiliarity with the types of tasks being tested. And these scores had some very real consequences, as they were used to justify programmes that aimed to accelerate natural selection through “selective breeding”. In the US, forcible sterilisation of “feeble-minded people” and “imbeciles” (often determined by IQ tests) occurred up until the 1960s. The majority of these individuals were black, female and from a low socio-economic background.
Despite the historical misuse of IQ tests, in many ways they remain the most advanced option we have for measuring or predicting intelligence. Modern IQ tests have undergone significant development and have been shown to strongly predict scholastic achievement, making them a useful tool that is still commonly used to identify children who could benefit from specialised academic assistance. Crucially, these tests aim not to measure how much a person already knows, but rather to gauge their ability to learn – in other words, to minimise the advantage of having prior knowledge in any particular field and to test the ability of the person to make generalisations that will enable them to deduce new information from abstract rules. Learning has,
Intelligence was not a fixed
or singular thing that people
possessed – it was highly malleable and could develop at
different rates and in different ways in different people ...
term memory, vocabulary and reading comprehension skills, and quantitative reasoning. However, despite the seemingly wide scope of the test, Binet himself high- lighted its shortcomings, maintaining that something as multifaceted as intelligence could not be accurately captured by a quantitative test. He noted that intelligence not only encompassed certain difficult-to-measure aspects, such as creativity and emotional intelligence, but that it was also influenced by a child’s upbringing and not purely the result of genetic coding. Intelligence was not a fixed or singular thing that people possessed – it was highly malleable and could develop at different rates and in different ways in different people, he argued. Giving a child a test and assuming that the result provided any kind of concrete information about their mental abilities – or their potential for success in life – was therefore short-sighted.
However, the lure of being able to screen, sort and compare people proved far too tempting. With the development of an IQ test specifically for adults by David Wechsler in the 1930s, intelligence tests quickly gained popularity in a variety of educational and vocational settings in Europe and the US. And despite Binet’s warnings about the limitations of quantitative intelligence tests, they continued to form the backbone of many ethnocentric and eugenicist arguments. These arguments advanced Galton’s idea of biological differences between race groups, often claiming that higher intelligence among the dominant white group – as evidenced by generally higher IQ scores than those
Learning has, thus, become synonymous with intelligence –
and this is true for both humans and machines, as it is on this
fundamental learning capability that developments in artificial
intelligence are focused.
thus, become synonymous with intelligence – and this is true for both humans and machines, as it is on this fundamental learning capability that developments in artificialintelligencearefocused.BigTechcompanies, such as Amazon, Google, and IBM are using the model of human reasoning to guide the improvement of the products and services they offer, rather than to produce a perfect replication of the human mind. In these
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