Patrick House at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
The trajectory of intelligent life on this planet can be described as an evolution of its verbs: to move, to reproduce, to hunt, to hide, to feel, to make, to use, to think. With the recent rise of artificial intelligence and competent chatbots, many experts have volubly opined about which verbs matter for what counts as “intelligence.” But like artificial insemination, artificial hearts, and artificial reefs, artificial intelligence was designed to interface with biology; its abilities and purpose are inferred exclusively from this interaction.
Nonetheless, there are cogent arguments that humanity has birthed, inside the world’s computer data centers and built on or alongside large language models, a computational process that skipped having to move, reproduce, hunt, hide, or feel and went straight to intelligence. Is this true?
The computer engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas believes so. Sort of. It depends on how you define “intelligence.” In his new book What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds, Agüera y Arcas toes the line between naturalist and computer scientist, and with broad genius and rare humility answers in the affirmative: our computers are indeed intelligent. Not because of what they are, but because of what they do.
More here.
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