Where does your intelligence come from? Is it what you’ve learned or where you’ve been? Does it have more to do with the miracle of your biology and the spark of life that makes you tick?

Intelligence is all the rage these days, it’s a hot topic you can’t escape. Apparently, we’ve gotten tired or bored with having it. Everywhere you look really smart and powerful people have decided that we have to fake it or else.

You’ve got to admit, the promised land looks pretty snazzy. Like the Jetsons, perhaps, (but a bit less colorful and no flying cars). All the tedious stuff that we used to actually have to do will be off our plates. We just have to name what we want, and Presto! Magic! Results!

Think about how much easier your life is already. It’s only getting better! Doing something as simple as composing an email used to mean you’d have to use your noggin to think of what to say, and you even had to wrestle with the tone of voice or level of formality. Now your email program can just reply for you!

The agony of writing in general can finally be dispensed with. Who needs to suffer creatively looking at a blank page when you can just tell the machine to make a manuscript for you to order?

Musicians can certainly celebrate this brave new world as well. Grinding through the songwriting process and spending those 10,000 hours to master an instrument seems oh-so-old-fashioned when you can just prompt your friendly chat bot and have a ready-to-release recording delivered to you in a jiffy.

The good news being brought to you by those at the top of tech mountain is that you don’t have to struggle with creativity anymore. You can just say ‘create something’ for me and voilà! There it is!

Trusting, of course, that these same wise tech wizards will soon cure cancer, reverse climate change, and guarantee social justice around the world. I think we can safely say that good times are ahead and the bad-old-days of toughing it out on our own are behind us.

Of course there are naysayers. Some say that the economics of these magical technologies don’t add up. To that I say, ask the machine how to make the numbers work! Others claim it’s causing our students brains to atrophy. Who cares when they can prompt their way to a PhD?

My little thought experiment here ran into a dead end on the primrose path to paradise. When the fake brains of the future run headfirst into biology, the whole thing falls apart.

“I’m too lazy to write, so publish a book for me.” Fine. “Art is hard, so design a poster for me.” Done. “I don’t have time to learn the guitar, so record a song for me” No problem.

“I don’t feel embodied, so dance for me.” What? System overload! Short circuit! That’s like asking the machine to be me for me. There’s no model large enough to come up with language that matches the essence of who you are inside. It’s a category error, like comparing apples to cinder blocks.

The biology that grounds our analog intelligence is miraculous. I still have more faith in it than anything artificial. I realized that this week when I had a tricky publishing problem to tackle.

It was the kind of problem that spans several domains. I thought about typing it into a search engine and seeing what the ‘summary’ would come up with, but even phrasing the query properly was giving me a headache.

So I decided to post it first on a forum where folks with real-world experience in the field hang out.

Lo-and-behold, I quickly had an expert offering me all sorts of help. Clarifying my questions, asking follow ups, and mapping out my strategy in a way that only someone with broad experience could manage. We exchanged at least a dozen messages and I felt fully informed.

I was left with the realization that when I want subject matter expertise, there’s nothing better than talking to an expert on the subject. For better or for worse, I’d rather hear from a single person who has been in the field a long time than an average of opinions scraped from the Internet by a bot.

You’ll never outsource the biology and spark that makes you who you are. Every person you know has their own particular kind of analog intelligence to offer.

Since the machine will never dance for you as you, you may as well hang on to your upstream talents for the time being, you never know when you might need them!

Merci et à bientôt!

M+

ML #689

Mark Metz
Monday Love Movement Calendar