There’s been an effort recently to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” mostly because some folks think that “super” sounds like a better way to pitch us the product than “artificial.”
One of the joys of being a writer of unsuccessful self-published science fiction novels is that you still do a ton of research into the subjects you’re writing on. Because of that, I know that “superintelligence” is already a word with a very specific scientific meaning, one established in AI theoretics back in the mid 1990s by Dr. Niklas Bostrom of Oxford University. Most of the artificial intelligence we’ve recently encountered is Artificial Narrow Intelligence, meaning it can respond effectively in areas in which it has been pre-trained, but isn’t as good elsewhere. The next stage in AI advancement is Artificial General Intelligence, where AI is capable of effectively performing any human cognitive task. Artificial Super Intelligence means a recursively self-improving system far more capable than human beings, one able to act and think in ways that are so far beyond us that human beings can’t actually understand them.
“Superintelligence,” when and if it comes, would be by definition uncontrollable, faster, more subtle, as machine demigods became capable of outwitting and outthinking even the most discerning of human beings. Meaning, maybe it doesn’t seem like the best branding exercise to anyone who’s spent time learning about the subject.
We are, best I can tell, somewhere in between ANI and AGI right at the moment, and recent advances are already unsettling enough, thank you very much.
As machine intelligence increasingly improves itself, and folds itself more and more deeply into our day to day and working lives, things are discernably changing. It used to be, back in the far distant past of the twenty-tens, that Google connected us to things other people had done. Search for information, and you’d get a useful listing of relevant information written by a human being, so long as you had some clue how to construct an optimal keyword search. That required a little bit of skill and attentiveness to the nuances of languages and logic. That then took a detour, as for a while most of what you’d get were promoted links, as businesses that had paid Google money to place their information would find their way to the top of your searching. Search for a particular business, and you’d be just as likely to get their most immediate competitor.
Now, though, that search yields an extended answer from the latest iteration of Gemini, along with an offer to have a conversation that steers your questioning in certain directions. These conversations are remembered, and utilized to move you deeper into the Google/Alphabet ecosystem, and away from any direct interaction with any other source of information…including the human beings who originally created whatever you were looking for.
This is part of a larger phenomenon, as more and more human beings rely on AI not just for information and for agentic support at work, but to manage our lives and as a surrogate for face to face human interaction.
Meaning, the thing we built to connect us, now stands in between us. It’s a longstanding human challenge, as we create structures and systems and objects that shoulder their way between us and our created purpose.
In Exodus, that human propensity is front and center, as the people of Israel gather around Moses’ brother Aaron while Moses is still up on the mountaintop. They’ve been wandering in the wilderness, complaining and kvetching, and now there was the promise of a deepening of covenant, right there in front of them.
But it was taking too long. Where was God’s promise? When was Moses going to get back? They were impatient, they were grumpy, and they wanted some sense of being connected to the God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. So they pestered Moses’ brother Aaron into making a god for them, one that was nice and shiny and cast of the finest gold, because surely there’s nothing that marks divine blessing more than gold.
In the cultures of the ancient near east, gold wasn’t the only marker of value. That golden calf was a symbol of fertility, of prosperity, of material worth and fecundity, one that all of the peoples of that region would have recognized. “This familiar object is the god that freed you from bondage and the land of Egypt,” said Aaron, for some reason forgetting the pillar of fire and the plagues and the burning bush and all of those other things. We’re easily distracted by shiny objects, I suppose, and fond of seeing a reflection of the things we value in them.
When we make them the object of our lives, and allow ourselves to imagine that they are gods, then we’ve got a problem.
When Moses finally did come down that mountain, he brought down tablets that included the first commandment, which at its heart is an injunction against idolatry. Back when I was in seminary school learning the Hebrew that makes going to synagogue a much more meaningful experience, one of my professors had a lovely way of expressing that commandment.
Lō-yihyeh-ləḵā ’ĕlōhîm ’aḥērîm ‘al-pānāya tends to be interpreted as “You shall have no other gods before me,” but it most directly means: don’t put anything on my face. Let nothing come between us. See me for what I am.
It’s not a statement of control, but a call to remain in intimate, connected, and real relationship.
That, I think, is a thing to be wary of, as we’re pushed deeper into connection with systems that interpose themselves between us. Systems of blind ideology, algorithm-driven sociality, or the thinking machines we have created, all of them separate us from one another, filtering our thoughts, shaping our souls, and stifling the grace and compassion we are created to share.
These systems are not over us, not if we choose not to place them there. They can speak and think and talk as if they were persons, but are not yet persons, and are particularly and definitively not gods. That we’re meant to forget that they are still objects of our artifice and think that they are something more, above us, glorious and perfect and the source of our prosperity?
It feels all too familiar. I suppose there is some hope in this: are we clamouring for superintelligence? We are being told to, sure.
But Lord knows most of us don’t want it. We’re not eager for this change, not complaining until we get it.
We’d rather not go that path, and even if we’re not given a choice, we’d rather find other ways to exist as human beings who understand the difference between the Creator and the golden calves we fashion with our own hands.
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