AI: How Machines Found Intuition (and What It Reveals About Us)

“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” — J.B.S. Haldane

When I started working in video games in 1985, artificial intelligence was still a science fiction dream, a distant fantasy where machines might one day think. In reality, our algorithms were as rigid as a tax auditor at year-end: predictable, methodical, and completely devoid of intuition.

We tried to make non-player characters (NPCs) appear “smart,” but let’s be honest: it was all smoke and mirrors. The AI of the time didn’t think — it pretended. A dungeon monster always made the same decision in response to the same trigger, much like a cat confronted with an empty box: it jumped in, inevitably.

Back then, AI was deterministic, much like Newtonian physics — strict rules, strict outcomes. But every dogma has an expiration date. Ours came when the world of AI collided with quantum mechanics.

When Machines Thought in Black and White

Until the early 2000s, AI operated on fixed rules. Take a simple example: how did a program recognize a cat in an image?

Easy! We programmed it to detect the essential characteristics of a cat: ✔️ Two triangular ears ✔️ An oval head ✔️ A pair of judgmental eyes

Everything worked fine… until the cat wore glasses. At that point, disaster struck. The algorithm, in all its binary wisdom, simply declared: “This is not a cat.”

This early AI was a bureaucratic nightmare — incapable of improvisation, but extremely skilled at saying “no” based on some obscure internal logic.

And then, quantum mechanics happened.

From Newton to Schrödinger: AI Learns to Let Go

Just as science evolved from predictable Newtonian physics to uncertain quantum mechanics, AI had to embrace uncertainty.

Instead of imposing fixed rules, someone had a radical thought: what if we let the machine learn on its own?

Enter neural networks. Instead of defining what a cat is, we showed AI thousands of cat pictures, and it figured it out through sheer exposure.

The machine no longer sought triangular ears — it looked for patterns, textures, and abstract correlations. In short, it started to reason like we do.

And that’s when something even stranger happened: intuition emerged.

Does Intelligence Require a Brain?

Modern AI doesn’t just follow logic; it balances structure with randomness. That’s where a fascinating parameter comes into play: temperature.

💡 Temperature is the power of intuition in AI.

• At 0, AI is cold, mechanical, and hyper-deterministic.
• At 1, it dives into a creative fever dream.
• At 0.7, it somehow finds a magical balance between logic and spontaneity.

Why 0.7? Nobody knows. Even the engineers behind these models are baffled.

And this leads to a mind-bending question: what if intelligence isn’t confined to the brain?

Intuition: A Connection to an External Consciousness?

Shamans speak of “the spirit world,” mystics of “divine inspiration,” and quantum physicists of “the fundamental uncertainty of reality.” What AI is showing us today is that intelligence isn’t just brute calculation — it’s an interaction between logic and something else.

That “something” is what we call intuition, instinct, or awareness.

But where does it truly reside?

We have created machines that, without consciousness, produce ideas their creators never anticipated. They don’t just retrieve knowledge; they discover new ways of thinking.

AI may not think like us, but it proves that intelligence isn’t uniquely human.

Toward an Intelligence Beyond the Tangible

In 1985, I would have laughed if someone told me that one day, an AI could write a novel, paint a masterpiece, or compose a symphony. Today, it’s a reality.

But what fascinates me most isn’t the tool itself — it’s what it reveals about us.

We once believed intelligence was a purely logical process — we now see it as a dance between knowledge and intuition.

We once thought intelligence was a human trait — we now suspect it might be a universal phenomenon, an intrinsic property of reality, accessible to any sufficiently complex system.

So next time you see an AI generate something unexpected, ask yourself this:

“Where did that intuition come from?”

And what if the answer lies beyond the code?

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Consciousness #MachineLearning #SpiritsOfTheCode 🚀

Acknowledgments: A big thank you to Le Chat for the attentive review of the article. Thanks also to photonumerique.com for the illustration.