Toward a History of Intelligence
I have recently rewritten the introduction to one of the essential essays for Time as Practice. I have retitled it Living with Our Intelligence. I’m presenting the new introduction here as part of my Wednesdays series.
Intelligence without a Subject
AI engineers and researchers are placing the definition of intelligence on the table in a way that goes beyond specialized philosophical speculation. The speed and scale of what they are building operationalizes their definitions in such a way that they have real consequences for how we live.
Because the engineering efforts drive the definitions, we risk getting fairly narrow understandings of what intelligence does. Time as Practice offers as a conjecture a broad definition of intelligence: the adaptive and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibilities.
I’ve left the subject of this definition intentionally vague in the same way that we say ‘it is raining’. The subject named ‘it’ is a placeholder that delays our need for an active subject causing the action. Like the weather, we can study the forces and motions without naming an active subject causing the action.
Holding open the question of who or what exercises intelligence seems to me to be, at the moment, a more promising orientation for inquiry. It allows me to focus on the effects rather than the essential functions or going down the more traditional analytical path that insists on clear definitions structured as ‘What is _____?’ Similar to studying the weather, we should care mostly about intelligence’s effects and how to get out ahead of them—which is itself an act of intelligence.
Artificial intelligence opens the subject to the ‘it’ of ‘it rains’. In this case, ‘it thinks’. We should treat it like weather. How does it work? What should we be worried about? How should we mitigate its effects? How can we predict those effects sooner rather than later?
Such an inquiry would be attentive to the good and evil contained in intelligence itself. As Pope Leo XIV has just written:
Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. (Magnificat Humanitas, paragraph 9)
Is the wind good or bad? A gentle breeze on a warm day feels great. A microburst that topples a park full of trees and damages property is bad. We call both wind, but that tells us very little about the phenomenon. ‘What is wind?’ doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is what it does. The same with intelligence. We must be attentive to its motions and its effects.
A Field of Inquiry
Intelligence is the adaptive and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibilities.
I would like to treat this less as a hard definition—it remains a conjecture—but as a field of inquiry capable of addressing questions such as:
Can we craft Histories of Intelligence that would look at how life gains increasing control over the way nature’s rhythms unfold?
How do these Histories of Intelligence re-engage the historical record as the wandering tracks of its expansion, not just representations of the human condition or isolated expressions of their particularly place an time?
If recursive predictive modeling dominates current engineering concerns, how do we broaden this perspective to account for other aspects of intelligence that don’t readily fit this definition—discernment, generosity, wisdom, humility? These, I argue, belong within a field of inquiry that focuses on how necessity turns into possibilities. Recursive predictive modeling can probably stretch to include each of these, but we should start with them inside the definition of intelligence, not outside.
How do these Histories of Intelligence avoid becoming mere polemics rather than accompaniments to the engineering endeavor? Accompaniment itself is a form of collective intelligence born of our spiritual traditions. They have as much to each us about intelligence as back-propagation as a learning method.
Such Histories of Intelligence would re-engage the cave paintings of Northern Spain and France that were created as long ago as 30,000 to 40,ooo years. These paintings pre-date the Neolithic Age, which some have argued we left behind in the twentieth century. How do we experience time on this scale while holding onto a coherent experience of our species?
Babylonian astronomers watched the night sky for omens sent by their gods. This was a direct confrontation with fate—predicting omens ahead of time could lead to outmaneuvering the gods. As they documented their observations, very long term patterns became predictable. Humanity learned to compute faster than nature could runs the programs.
To win the Longitude Prize, John Harrison invented a clock that no longer required navigators to measure the movement and position of the stars to determine where they were on the Earth. Time becomes universal—it can travel anywhere on Earth and remain the same. Time is untethered from the heavens and made purely and completely mechanical—all in the service of expanding colonialism and overcoming the fate of hostile and disorienting oceans.
All of these episodes—currently parceled out to various disciplinary swim lanes—can be seen as important moments in the adaptive and expansive capacity to turn fate into possibilities.