GEEK FREE
By Joe Callison
24 July, 2025
Artificial Intelligence Challenges – Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom
Knowledge bases have been around far longer than any of us. Libraries have been repositories of information, facts, skills, and many other categories of data that make up knowledge. Librarians and card catalog systems were the search engines aiding our access to desired data for many years.
Computers have largely taken over the functions of both the repositories and the search engines, but have lacked the intelligence of librarians and researchers to filter data until the recent advances in artificial intelligence were applied to man-made search engines. However, the ability to mimic human reasoning and decision-making requires tremendous resources in computing power and human development of algorithms, models, and data sets for training, testing, and retraining artificial intelligence implementations in order for them to be useful.
While machines can be made to mimic human intelligence, they lack the understanding, insight, and discernment to make wise judgments and decisions based on knowledge and experience, or the influence of ethics. There are few universal truths or rules that humans could agree on to train machines to follow. Situational ethics will always present challenges and dilemmas for machine responses just as they do for humans. Take, for example, the case of self-driving cars. If a large truck is approaching in the opposite lane just as a pedestrian steps into the lane in front of the car, and there is no way of avoiding both, what is the proper action to be taken by the car? Life and death decisions by artificially intelligent machines will raise many ethical and legal issues to be resolved by humans.
