Illustration by DALL·E: “The human being worshipping his own intelligence”

Intelligence: A defining feature of our pride

Humankind’s intelligence has always been praised by humans as maybe their defining quality. Animals around us display some of this intelligence but to a lesser degree, what Rousseau called in a non-disparaging way, the “stupidity” of the animal. What would happen now if another entity were likely to rightly consider us stupid by comparison?

Since the origins of life there has been an objective motive for the human race to experience a state of melancholy, of chronic depression: the discovery one day by each and every one of us that one’s presence on this earth will last only temporarily: that, as individuals embodied in corporeal flesh, we are mortal. Now, two new forces have sprung up, pulling in opposite directions, one constituting an additional source of chronic depression, the other being the source of inordinate pride in the species as a whole, justifying for all eternity its fleeting presence within the grandiose framework of an all-encompassing global History of the universe.

For on the one hand, it is our cherishing of our personal intelligence that is getting devalued once and for all by the appearance of a being smarter than ourselves, not on an exoplanet somewhere in a distant galaxy, but right in our midst, and so much more so that the individual differences that constitute such a source of pride for the most intelligent among us would seem imperceptible, a new context having been created where intelligence has abruptly, with instantaneous short notice, ceased to be a rare commodity.

On the other hand, it is indisputable that it is human genius in its millennia of evolution that has made possible this miracle of natural intelligence generating artificial intelligence that would be superior to it, a masterpiece engendered over twenty-five centuries of this philosophy inaugurated by Socrates, the culmination of the spirit of the Enlightenment conceived for us, who are its heirs, by Rousseau, Goethe and the Encyclopædists.

Two opposing movements come together as they cross: one in which the self-esteem of individuals takes a hit, the other in which the pride of the species as a whole is irrevocably glorified, if only in its own eyes, in the event we are the only intelligent creatures in the universe to date and where, paradoxically of course, the more our solitude is demonstrated, the greater is the scale of our achievement.

There lies undoubtedly here, behind the upheaval that these LLMs are creating in our daily lives, a profound anthropological crisis brewing, as disconcerting surely as those that Linnæus, Darwin and Freud triggered in their time in the representation that human beings make of themselves.

Of course the concept of an intelligence superior to our own, which we are confronted with today, is not foreign to us. Indeed, the theme of aliens having a better understanding of who we are than we do ourselves is a classic of science fiction literature. To take just one example, let’s think of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), even if the benevolence of these creatures from outer space knowing a great deal more than we do is not without ulterior motives in the context of a universal Grand Plan.

Illustration by DALL·E: “The human being worshipping his own intelligence”