Oh, crap.
Brace yourself, dear reader. It is philosophy time!
This is hopefully the first post in a lengthy series discussing AI. It is, however, not about how to make your office-life different or your production fly. This is for people who want to understand AI and perhaps discuss it. Hell, it is for myself too: I don’t understand AI, and I think it would be pretentious for anyone to say they fully do. So, if you want to see the ramblings of an old techie, please read along.
I am going to start with a bit of philosophy and history. Would you like that? …that’s fine; I’ll write about it anyway.
A hot take
AI is not an invention. It’s a new attempt to recreate something ancient: the mystery of how thought arises. Reason, adaptation, creation and understanding: the four concepts of intelligence have not changed since Aristotle, when intellect meant “the power to understand what is true”. [1] Although Aristotle probably meant an individual’s power, today with AI, we are talking about power over others—currently it is about financial power, but in the future it is likely to be more and more about social power. As we, humanity, evolve, we often use new tools to get new power over each other. Media did that, and social media followed suit. Now, we ask ChatGPT about everything. We listen to it and often accept its response as truth. It has genuine power over us. Wouldn’t you like to understand what makes your personal assistant tick, or where it is likely to evolve? I do.
But I jumped the gun there a bit. I want to discuss the four concepts of intelligence.
Power to reason
The power to understand what is true. This always makes me pause. What does that even mean? It is a deep rabbit hole, but I’ll stick with the ancient Greeks, who defined it to understand causes, classify things, and draw conclusions. AI can surely do that. Cloud providers offer a suite of classification tools, and ChatGPT draws conclusions—sometimes a bit too much, if you ask me.
Ability to adapt
Darwin and later psychologists reframed intelligence as the ability to adapt: to learn from experience and change behavior when the environment changes. [2][3] A simple animal that learns not to touch fire shows a primitive intelligence, even if it cannot “reason”. That’s easy, right? “If the temperature is greater than 75 degrees Celsius, do not drive the bot forwards.”
To create and imagine
Artists, inventors, and mystics saw intelligence as imagination: the ability to make something new. Creativity, intuition, and the unconscious mind. Unless we put our tin foil hats on, AI does not have an unconscious mind, but can it be intuitive or creative? Midjourney can create images based on feelings and other abstract concepts: is the bot creative or is it just variations on a theme with stolen data?
Understanding
In religion and philosophy, awareness has often linked intelligence to the sense of self that perceives, feels, and reflects. Here, intelligence becomes not just problem-solving but being aware that one is solving. Does ChatGPT understand it is solving a marital dispute or how to find a mate online? I am pretty confident that it does not. I hope we find proof of this during this post series.
The divine machine
Throughout history, when humans encountered a phenomenon they couldn’t explain, they often attributed it to superhuman intelligence: gods, spirits, or fate. The ancient Greeks had Hephaestus, the god who forged living automata. In medieval alchemy and religion, the creation of artificial life (the golem, the homunculus) symbolized the boundary between human craft and divine power. In modern times, as technology advanced, science fiction replaced gods with machines: artificial minds built by human hands but capable of surpassing them.
When we imagine intelligence greater than our own, we project our hopes, fears, and moral questions onto it—whether we call it “God,” “the universe,” or “AI”. This is not just mythology. It shapes how societies respond to AI even today: with a mix of awe, fear, and expectation of salvation or doom. “AI doomers” believe that the sixth extinction may not be by nature, but by artificial intelligence. Others believe AI will produce a race of benign overlords, and we do not have to work anymore.
I believe that knowledge is the best cure for fear and a good catalyst for hope. Don’t worry, I almost cringed myself on that. Anyway, let’s try to understand AI! That will happen in the upcoming posts. Ha! A cliffhanger! See you there!
Footnotes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous
[2] Cognition and Intelligence as Psychological Adaptations
[3]The evolution of intelligence: adaptive specializations versus general process