Agencies of Intelligence: From the Macro to the Nano

Abstract

‘Homo sapiens’ (Latin for ‘Wise Man’) is what we call our species. Wisdom and Intelligence stands at the center of how we define ourselves. But what is intelligence, and how does it influence an agent’s ability to face the world? In this chapter, we review an array of perspectives from the outer behavioral aspects of intelligence such as generalization, optimization and learning to its inner compositional that emphasizes intelligence in terms of networking and connectivity. Our journey will walk us through the concept of omnipotency where an entity has it all, knows it all, and does it all; to the nanopotency where the entity has little, knows little, and does little. From the original manifestation of the human dream to create the omnipotent being, we now come to its recent realization that perhaps less can be more. We will illustrate by sharing a few of our findings on traditionally hard problems such as robotics, urban traffic, fault detection and isolation, portfolio selection and judicial/medical decision making to the more evasive and humanly profound problems such as the atherosclerosis and cancer.