intelligence

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it

it’s hard to empirically quantify intelligence because it exists only relative to our expectations – expectations that are human and, moreover, individual to particular humans.

intelligence has inadvertently become a ‘human success’-shaped cookie cutter we squish onto other species. Switching from baking to sports metaphors, we could say that everyone else – animals, amoebas, AIs and aliens – has to play the game on a field that we have laid out, according to rules that we have established and proven ourselves extremely... See more

we tell ourselves that humans do something clever or tactical because our brains have simulated that this course of action will produce favourable outcomes, but when we learn that ants do the same thing by enacting preprogrammed responses to pheromones, surely that doesn’t count.