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The curious comfort of machine intelligence
It would be foolish to underestimate AI. But take heart, there are parts of our humanity it can’t replicate.
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The blunting of our assumed greatness is necessary, though it ought not to throw us into existential despair, says the writer.
ST ILLUSTRATION/AI-GENERATED: CEL GULAPA, ADOBE STOCK
Gwee Li Sui
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I once heard a fellow writer declare with conviction, “There is nothing intelligent about AI!” These words still haunt me not so much because they startlingly ignore how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the likes are works in progress and will only improve with time.
Rather, the words lay bare an old conceptual assumption that many continue to hold today. This is to think of intelligence as the sole purview of humans and, grudgingly, a few hundred other species. Intelligence is what allegedly characterises higher life forms and so can in no way describe inanimate things, which are stupid. The stone does not exhibit an awareness of its environment, nor does it dialogue with other stones.
