What Makes You Clever: The Puzzle of Intelligence

This book takes an intensive analysis of something that everyone is an expert in: intelligence. We all have it, we all use it, but what is it? And can we build a computer to replicate it? This book considers intelligence from every aspect.

Defining intelligence is hard; creating it is even harder. Computer scientists have been promising the imminent final breakthrough for over 40 years, and it still isn’t here. Partridge sums up the difficulty in one striking phrase “We can’t understand the plot of Downton Abbey by taking apart the television”.

The rest of the book explores why investigating Intelligence is so difficult. Along the way it touches on paradox and enigma, on psychology and puzzles, algorithms and models. Each chapter takes one approach to defining intelligence, dissects it and exposes its flaws. You would think that by now science would have found out everything there is to know about it. But in fact science has very little to say that is actually provable. Everything about intelligence that seems natural, obvious and normal turns out not to be.

The book is a comprehensive review of the latest thinking around intelligence, human and artificial, from various perspectives. It covers Turing’s Test, cognitive modelling, MRI scans, neurological dissection, predicate logic, the paradox of self-organising systems, and the many attempts by philosophers and computer scientists to reason their way to an understanding.

Overall the book sums up the whole field admirably, and whilst it fails to come up with an answer, it asks enough questions to keep the reader engaged for decades.