Question: People say computers are cleverer than humans aren't we cleverer because we (well you guys ) invented new models and still are?

Gary Munnelly answered on 8 Nov 2018:

This is a really good question!

Believe it or not, a computer is just a massive, very powerful calculator. Everything that you see a computer do, whether it is running games, browsing the Internet, or interpreting data essentially boils down to the computer doing lots of addition, multiplication, subtraction and division very quickly! So the computer never understands what it is doing. We just find a way to describe a problem we are having using simple operations, and the computer executes those steps for us. Eventually the computer gives us back an answer (or many answers). So the computer can give us clever answers to hard questions, but it is not in and of itself clever. It could never conceive of the question without humans to program it.

I guess one way to think about it is, do you think your calculator is cleverer than you because it can do maths faster than you? Probably not. But your calculator can help you to answer complex mathematical questions because that is what it is programmed to do. Even so, the calculator can’t do maths without you giving it a problem. So a calculator without a user will never solve an unknown mathematical problem.