One of the famous computer scientists and the pioneers of AI, Jeffrey Hinton has said that our understanding of how the human brain works is going through a major change. And this, he believes, we will also change the way we and the subjects that study human behavior, such as humanities. In an interview with Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, he explained that as a brain science advances, we are beginning to feel that humans are not as logical or rational as we believe for a long time. As we develop more understanding of how the brain works, we are fundamentally going to change our attitude of how people work, and it is about to change humanities, ”Hinton said.

Hinton compared the change that about 100 years ago when psychoanalysis became popular. That period, he explained, people thought of human behavior. Even though some ideas were suspicious, it helped people to accept that humans often act on the basis of unconscious thoughts and feelings.

“We admitted that we have all kinds of unconscious motivations. We admitted that we used all types of similes to do things instead of logic only. We originally admitted that we were much less rational than what we used to think,” Hinton said. This new change, he said, is even bigger, “because till now, most people, including humanities, have thought that we are like using something like arguments. We are rational creatures. We are not – we are no – we are great, big analogous machines. We work by looking at the upma.”

Hinton believes that people understand the world by comparing them with things that they already know, often make a relationship between many ideas at once.

He said, “Apes, not only with one thing, but also with a lot of things. And because what you think as a person’s nature. We are analogy machines instead of arguing the analogy machines,” he said.

He also said that when humans use logic, it is only a small part of how we work. “We have found a thin layer of argument at the top, and it is very important to do things like mathematics. Without logic, you may not have bank accounts and things, but we basically use similes to think.”

Hint’s insights suggest that as AI, to understand how humans really think that it will be important to design machines that do more work like us – not by imitation of logic, but the way we draw up the upma in everyday life, by copying.