#17: Seriously, what is Intelligence? - by John Loeber
We are in the earliest innings of an intelligence revolution: progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence is now rapid, and the innovations are becoming accessible to the public just as quickly. Millions of people are now using tools like ChatGPT, and may be thinking about what it would mean to have AGI in their lifetimes. This includes fearful policymakers and lobbyists who want to control and restrict AI. They make arguments about the dangers of rogue intelligence — AI escaping our control.
But these arguments tend to leave out what exactly they mean when they say “intelligence”. This is no coincidence, because these arguments are often not actually about intelligence when you examine them closely. They are about related, but distinct concepts (like consciousness or emotion) that are often conflated for anthropological reasons. In that way, because intelligence is such a nebulous concept, it is easy for people to make misleading arguments about it. My objective in this blog post is to:
Out of all the life on planet Earth, we humans are spectacularly unique and capable. For example, we possess the following qualities: 1
