Abstract Intelligence

Something I’ve been pondering over this week is how do we define intelligence?

Is it our ability to memorize? At least our schools used this scale to measure intelligence. Is it reasoning and aptitude? Yes, probably. IQ tests are built on these parameters. Is it the ability to learn new skills? Painting, music, coding, driving, calculus, poetry. Umm, looks like it. Someone who can acquire these skills to a good level must be intelligent.

All of them are valid ways to measure some aspects of a person’s intelligence. Do they define it in whole though? And more importantly, the aspects that we’re talking about, do they make the person valuable?

For example, if a person from early 1960s is really good at arithmetic, he will be considered both intelligent and valuable. He’d be paid to crunch numbers, until one day, a tiny machine enters the market and does exactly what he does, just infinitely faster and infinitely better, for free. Is he valuable now?

Calculator is a classic example. Internet is slightly modern. I was trained for 15 years to memorize the information in books and write it on a piece of paper without seeing. I could do it well, so everyone thought I was “intelligent”. Now this skill is meaningless — I can google just about anything in seconds. I’m young, so am very good at that too (still intelligent :P).

Move forward to today, AI has made even googling obsolete. You can ask your question in plain language and you will get the answer. Even a professional googler like me won’t match your speed. I can be more accurate, but this too will be resolved in a couple of years.

That’s one small use-case of AI. LLMs can write essays and poems and code and narrate renaissance like a 5 year old. They can scrape the internet in 5 minutes and produce 10,000-word reports on the effects of climate change in your hometown. AI can predict cancer and tomorrow’s weather. It can drive your car too.

AI is already usable, but at this rate of growth, it is going to render most of today’s skills meaningless very soon. It will code better, write better, paint better, compose better, and research better of course.

So back to the main question, how do you define intelligence and how does one still remain valuable when “intelligence” is getting commoditized by technology.

The answer is that intelligence isn’t tied to any particular skill. It doesn’t matter whether you have encyclopedic knowledge of your field, or you can do calculus in your head, or you can make perfect use of similes and metaphors in your poem. No, that does not fully define intelligence. And, as we’ve seen, has already been taken over by technology.

Intelligence is abstract. It is your ability to think, create, bring a change. That’s all. Everything else is a mere tool you use to turn your abstract thoughts into reality.

In other words, intelligence is about making use of your skills and everything around you, including technology. The role of a world-breaking technology like internet or AI is to segregate the intelligent from the skilled. To filter out those who can see this new technology as a tool and leverage it to their advantage, from those who are skilled in one (now obsolete) domain.

Think of composers who aren’t very good instrumentalists themselves. Think of mathematicians who don’t do a lot of calculations. Think of scientists formulating theories that will only be relevant hundreds of years later, once the tech is in place. These people are able to think in abstract terms and rely on other people and tools to bring their ideas to reality.

Okay so I’m making a couple of mistakes for the sake of conveying my ideas. One, the right word would be ingenuity rather than literal intelligence. And two, it’s not about one person being more intelligent than the other. I’m talking about human intelligence in general.

Humans have the unique ability to think and to create. They have free will and their actions aren’t fully tied to their genes. So the human level of ingenuity isn’t found elsewhere in nature and is probably impossible to produce artificially.

Any piece of technology can take charge of one thing that a human does and do it really well. (AI seems to be versatile but it’s really doing just top-level intelligence things). But the sheer ability to think and create is uniquely human.

I am realizing this while writing this piece. Any LLM can convey my ideas better, it can write it in a refined way, with better examples, probably some references here and there. But the fact remains that these are my ideas. And no technology can think these ideas. I am the source, because I am human.

We’ll always be the source. We’ll always be the ones taking advantage. Everything is a tool that, in itself, is worthless. We give it value by using it to create something meaningful. That is the purpose of intelligence, that is what defines intelligence.

Long piece of rambling. No pictures. No other sections.

Good night :)
Aachman