The place of intuition in the digitalized world

Abstract

Intuition is understood in the article as the intelligence of the unconscious, taking into account all the information possessed by the subject as well as individual abilities and preferences. Intuition makes itself felt in various ways. It cooperates with consciousness when more important decisions are to be made or directly controls the behavior of an individual (in case of so-called operational intelligence). The author reflects on the role of intuition in the digitalized world and comes to the conclusion that digital technology partially replaces intuition’s function but at the same time limits and blocks its development. He also notes that the concept of intuition in experimental psychology has been wrongly narrowed to spontaneously used heuristics in response to irrelevant questions, which usually leads to biased, inaccurate assessments. Finally, the suggestion appears that there is an analogy between human intuition, treated as the intelligence of the unconscious, and the direction of development of artificial intelligence. The use of the deep machine learning means that we know less and less about the processes taking place in the “black box,” which often leads to spectacular [? disastrous/bad] results. The term digital intuition seems to be an adequate description of this state of affairs. The common denominator of human and digital intuition is that information processing – although it leads to the desired effects – remains inaccessible to both the subject’s consciousness and the user (or even the designer) of the intelligent machine.