There's a ton of public discourse right now about artificial intelligence, and the vast majority of it is profoundly confused. Some of that confusion stems from ignorance. But much of it is purposefully sown. You can book lucrative speaking gigs, not to speak of PR-ing your founder career by perpetuating fake paper tigers. But we need to return to the foundational truth of what this technology actually is.
Artificial intelligence is exactly what the phrase says: a form of intelligence that is human-made, intelligence that does not arise naturally.
To grasp how artificial intelligence is artificial, start by grasping how adjective-free intelligence is natural.
Natural intelligence is really a property of biology. We descend into philosophical territory when we say that human intelligence is the only natural intelligence. For you see intelligence across the biological spectrum --- arguably across the organic spectrum. Dogs, cats, people; arguably mushrooms, grass, trees.
We once relied on a "lower and higher" scale to rank intelligence, placing human cognition at the pinnacle.
That is reductive, yet it underscores a fundamental reality: natural intelligence is inseparable from life itself --- the mechanism by which biological entities navigate and survive their environments.
Now strip away the biology. What's left? Non-biological matter. Silicon. Metal. Plastic. Take that matter and use it purposefully to create a system that achieves a specific goal --- you've created artificial intelligence.
Colloquially, the term "AI" brings to mind the latest release of Google's Gemini model. Or perhaps Anthropic's. So how about that digital clock that you wired to your water pipe to sprinkle your tomato pots at 8 AM? That sprinkling system didn't grow out of biology. But it performs intelligence. The digital clock and the PVC tube do not jointly have a natural drive to nurture your gorgeous plants. But they jointly do nurture your plants. And you built that. You built that to reproduce, artificially, what you'd otherwise have to do naturally: water your tomatoes.
Artificial intelligence is an act of mimicry. We design systems we fully and deliberately control to reproduce our own ability to purposefully manipulate matter. What we build has no soul. What we build has no biological intent. Is it a new form of life? It is human purpose, encoded typically into inorganic material, executing the tasks we command it to perform.
Clear away the noise, look at the mechanics of what we're building, and you are left with a profound as well as entirely controllable human invention.
Ongoing thread. More from EP Pajo to follow.
