Despite the second Trump administration’s massive inaugural bet on artificial intelligence, the available AI tools have yet to make an upward dent in the economic roster. It’s almost as though intelligence doesn’t drive economies.
And this could be true, since the sort of intelligence that IQ tests measure explains only about 10–20% of the variation in individuals’ lifetime wealth accumulation, whereas self-control explains 30–40%.
This means neither AI nor high-IQ H-1B visa immigrants can believably prop up economic wealth in the long run unless we develop greater societal self-control. We would have to invest in teaching the increasingly diverse and queer populations about discipline—that is, do the exact opposite of “defund the police” policies.
But the much bigger problem is that almost no one even knows what intelligence is. The question belongs to the realm of philosophers and magicians who also ponder the other occult questions of what time, space, and motion are.
In the Bible, John 1:1 states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” With those words, the self-declared leaders of the Church of Tech stampeded their workforces into crafting large language models (LLMs), as though shifting words around is the road to human-like superintelligence.
According to this reductionist view of intelligence, all we had to do, they said, was scale the models. We could scrape all the search engines, read people’s private messages, process everyone’s emails, take the legal Archive.org, and harvest Anna’s Archive illegally. Ultimately, the best AI training data came from users spilling their private lives into the chat box along with their human stupidity.
Then, through some form of deus ex machina—a god (or goddess) from the machine—artificial general intelligence (AGI) should arrive in our hands! More data, more compute power, more intelligence? Not so fast.
Words are nothing without an inner understanding of what they represent. People use words to communicate such understanding to one another, and that communication requires both transmitter and receiver to have sufficient intelligence to appreciate each other’s intellect.
Dissident geniuses in the tech world, such as Yann LeCun (who left Meta), have already given up on LLMs in favor of so-called world models. These models are supposed to simulate physical reality and somehow provide the missing inner understanding that real intelligence requires.
Perhaps gaming physics engines that can map the entire universe will be the next big investment craze. Yes, the laws of physics do supplement the world of words, but no, neither language nor physics are a source of intelligence.
What all these attempts at generating intelligence still fundamentally miss is that real intelligence is fundamentally immaterial, like time. Intelligence is something that cannot be physically reproduced with machines or computers, for the same reason human beings cannot create new time or space.
Attempts to programmatically produce space, time, or intelligence must therefore fail. The dream of artificial general intelligence instead signals a loss of trust in human intelligence. Why?
Organic intelligence is the property of minds that can be infused into everything else. Fusing one’s intelligence with words creates speech, books, sitcoms, poetry, and more. Fusing one’s intelligence with the physical world creates machines, tools, architecture, irrigation, and so on.
It is famously said that wealth is created by applying labor and creativity to resources. The end products of human ingenuity are usually worth a lot more than their raw materials. AI data centers, too, are an end product, not a source.
Intelligence, then, is the thing that creates; it is not the thing created. Ergo, we cannot create intelligence artificially. The only way to “create” intelligence is for intelligent beings to procreate.
So what is this elusive intelligence that appears to us as a kind of imaginative will able to impose itself on the world of words and things? For one thing, organic intelligence has more to do with seeing than with calculating, more with sensing than with attaching weights to data.
Last century, philosophers such as Martin Heidegger described technology in terms of the “flight of the gods.” When the gods withdraw their creative intelligence from our world, we are left with technology: moving parts, bolts and screws, gears and levers—but none of it appears to us as intelligent.
By that logic, our world is not moving closer to any dreamed-of artificial general intelligence. We are, rather, aggressively moving away from it. With over eight billion human minds, we are increasingly draining our collective intelligence to serve the needs of machines we must operate for the sake of the economy.
We are harvesting real human intelligence in order to fuel the illusion thereof. AI is the apparent attempt to make a bigger brain out of many brains. If that’s the case, then AI is silly, and we might as well go back to praying to God for His wisdom.