What is "actual" intelligence?

photo by Konstantin Mishchenko

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, recently gave a graduation speech and told the students they all have AI—actual intelligence. They cheered. Loudly.

He said scientists have been trying to figure out how to make a brain in a lab, but scientists already know how to make a brain. It takes nine months.

Wozniak said he’s not a fan of AI and doesn’t use it, but he’s tried it a few times and was disappointed. He said he’d ask it a question and AI dumps a whole bunch of information that sounds smart, but it totally misses what he was looking for.

He said the problem is that AI doesn’t understand how humans communicate and it doesn’t understand the nuance buried in human communication. It answers the question you did ask, not the question you wondered, but didn’t ask.

While I was listening, I was thinking how ironic it is that the number one place people download AI tools is from the Apple store.

After Wozniak’s speech, Seth Godin wrote a post called The Real AI and he talked about what “actual intelligence” is. He said actual intelligence is more important than ever and it’s rarely taught in schools. He made a list of what actual intelligence is.

It says stuff like this:

- The difficult work of making choices.

- The judgment to ask the right questions and skip the other ones.

- The patience to sit with the right problem rather than solving the wrong one.

- Seeking justice.

- Offering dignity.

His list is much longer, and you can read it here if you’re curious. I just cherry picked a few that stood out to me. But when I read all seventeen things on his list, what struck me was how rare some of them are, much less the combination of them.

Dignity, for example. Offering dignity—tell that to the men who posted “eyecheck” videos on the sleep rape site CNN wrote about. Did those men offer their wives or girlfriends any dignity? Does that mean they have no intelligence? What about the people posting angry and obscene comments? Do they have no intelligence?

But they must have, because if they had no intelligence, how would they do their jobs and pay their bills? Can we have intelligence and not use it? And is giving people their dignity part of intelligence or is it something else? I don’t know the answer to that.

The dictionary says intelligence is mental acuteness, and the ability to learn or understand things or deal with new or difficult situations.

I tend to think of intelligence as a capacity.

Here’s what I mean. Maybe your new car “can” go 200 miles an hour. But that doesn’t mean we drive it at that speed, you know? The Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut is the fastest road-legal production car. It’s capable of going 330mph. No one is driving it at that speed. What we are capable of, and how we operate are different things.

Is that what teachers mean when they say little Johnny is not performing to capacity and how do they know what his capacity is if he’s not performing to it?

But also? There are cars that can’t go 200mph, much less 330. You know?

So maybe some of us have the capacity for intelligence and don’t use it, while others have less capacity. And is that any different than saying a man who doesn’t read has no advantage over one who can’t.

Here’s an interesting thing. Scientists say there are actually things that make us dumber. Things that reduce the capacity of our brain to perform at its capacity, whatever that capacity might have been to start with.

Sleep deprivation is a big one. 24 hours without sleep and our reaction time slows to the level of a person who is legally intoxicated. But also? Multi-tasking does it too. So does mindlessly scrolling. Floods our brain with dopamine and kills our attention span and our capacity for deep reflection. But also? Using AI does it, too. Studies show that outsourcing cognitive tasks like problem solving and writing to AI reduces our ability to do those things without AI. All while making us feel like we “are” doing it.

And we can think that until we go try do the thing without AI to help.

But you know what else? What we eat. Because there’s a gut-brain connection and the foods we eat either help our brain perform, or they don’t. Too many years of refined sugars and highly processed foods can cause cognitive decline and brain fog.

Here’s a thought that throws me into a weird headspace.

It takes nine months to make an actual brain, right? A human. And then, no matter what capacity of “actual intelligence” that human started with, it can degrade.

And strangely, AI works exactly the same way.

Except it took five years, not nine months. Five years of foundational research and iterative model development for OpenAI to release the first public version of ChatGPT. Not to mention billions of dollars and billions of gallons of water. And it can degrade. Not because of lack of sleep or scrolling, but because of what we feed it.

They started with the best they could steal. Human writing and art. Work stolen from authors, artists, scientists and scholars. And what are we feeding it? Hate posts and hot takes on the internet. Like the thousand word diatribe a man wrote to explain to me that women have equality and we just hate men.

We feed it hate speech, political hot takes, self help, and undisclosed AI nevermind that they’ve been telling us AI trained on AI degrades. And do we care?

Or do we just not think about it? Maybe it’s just the marshmallow story all over again. The immediate pleasure pushes tomorrow out of our minds. I don’t know.

I watched a series called Tales from the Loop.

I liked it a lot and I’m sad they cancelled it. It’s a strange series about the intersection of humans and robots set in a midwestern town with a nostalgic feel. A series where time folds into itself. A little girl can’t find her mother. A boy finds a robot in the forest. And you have no idea what’s happening until the last episode.

You get glimpses. Little flashes that say omg, I know who that woman is! But mostly, you watch wondering what the hell is happening in this down. There’s a line in the series that haunts me a little. The man who created The Loop is remembering how it all started, and he says everything is connected, one way or another.

I can’t think of anything truer.

Sometimes, I wonder if the important conversation isn’t what intelligence is or how to create it. Maybe the important conversation is how we’re destroying it. But I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. I’d love to know what you think…

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