The age after intelligence

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Welcome to edition #22 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. Exploring what remains when machines outthink the ‘thinking human’, and why intuition, faith, wisdom and our responsibility to understand reality for ourselves matter more than ever.

This newsletter is for anyone looking to lead a happier, healthier, more meaningful life. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, technology and how we begin to build a better future together. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

If this piece of writing has an impact on you, please consider liking, commenting or sharing it so that it can reach more readers who may benefit from the message.

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Humanity has been led to believe that intelligence is the highest virtue.

If only we can become more intelligent then we will be able to solve all of our problems, both on a personal and societal level.

Unconsciously that is what the world has decided. We even named ourselves Homo Sapiens which literally means wise human or thinking human.

And it makes sense, when you look back through history it seems as though our intelligence is what separated us from beasts. It was humanity’s great competitive advantage. Our intelligence allowed us to outwit other animals and our environment to become the dominant species on earth. In the eyes of the animal kingdom, we have risen to be like gods. Gods that now decide the fate of the known world.

And we point to intelligence as the thing that got us here.

So we went on a quest to increase that intelligence. We started telling stories, reading, writing, conducting scientific experiments, building complex educational systems, creating media and internet systems that could give us all the answers to everything.

Even with all that, for all of history, intelligence was a scarce resource. Whoever had more of it, would have a massive advantage over the world around them.

Look at the early days of Silicon Valley, there was more intelligence there than anywhere else on earth and they are still reaping the benefits of that advantage today.

As humans, when we spot something that will give us an advantage, we go all-in. We needed even more intelligence. Intelligence will help us unlock the answers we’ve all been searching for. So we set about training complex models on everything that humans have created. We reached our biological limits so we turned our highest virtue over to technology

I have no doubt that the trend lines will continue as we go through The Acceleration Decade. It will be an unquenchable thirst. Soon intelligence will become so abundant that it will eventually feel like electricity. It’s just there, all the time whenever we need it. We won’t even think about it. And not just intelligence, but soon super intelligence, AGI, whatever you want to call it. At your very fingertips, on demand, for everyone.

Here is the irony.

I believe that my strange life path gave me a sneak preview as to what’s coming.

As soon as intelligence becomes wildly abundant, only then will we understand that it was never enough. It has never been our highest virtue.

Intelligence can tell us how. It cannot tell us why.

It can optimize our objectives, but it cannot choose them for us. It can lay out a hundred different paths, but it cannot tell us which mountain is worth climbing.

I spent most of my life climbing the wrong mountain at breakneck speed. I was a smart kid, early-on I was designated gifted and put in special classes. Classes that would foster and build my intelligence faster than the normal curriculum. Which reinforced to me that intelligence was the key to a successful, rich and meaningful life.

So I spent my entire life trying to become the smartest, most capable version of myself forgoing almost everything else. I thought more like a machine, as did those around me. I spent almost zero time deciding what I was using my intelligence and new capabilities for. Of course those thoughts would come up but I would distract or intoxicate myself until they would quiet down. They were too uncomfortable to sit with.

As my own intelligence and capabilities grew I was rewarded by society but it did not solve any of my problems, if anything, it exacerbated them. You could say that by increasing my intelligence, it allowed me to move much faster up the proverbial mountaintop. But up a mountain that I had not consciously chosen and my intelligence did not care about how I felt as I was climbing.

Increasing intelligence, without a clear direction, only helps us pursue unexamined lives with unprecedented efficiency.

And this, I fear, is where humanity is headed if we don’t sit with the uncomfortable, hard questions.

What is intelligence for?

When I get access to unlimited intelligence, what is worth pointing it at?

In a future where intelligence allows me to become anything, what is worth becoming?

Is there something greater at play than intelligence?

These are moral, ethical, philosophical and deeply personal questions, ones that only you can answer for yourself.

In the past we turned to institutions, like religion, to help us answer questions like this. Whether we are ready to admit it or not, we have created a new religion. Wherever our attention flows, that is what we worship. Today we worship intelligence, even if artificial is right in the name. We are willing to hand our agency over to a false god because sitting with the unknown is too uncomfortable.

Now we can see that religion wasn’t valuable because its claims were necessarily true or false. It was valuable because it forced us to ask ourselves deeper questions. Questions that markets, science, and technology do not try to get us to answer.

Intelligence alone can not answer these questions. Only you can. You. You must find out for yourself. No man or machine can give you the answer.

There is something deeper inside of you and you know it. You are not a meat suit with a brain that calculates every decision you make. There is something else going on. Intelligence is great but it’s a secondary layer at best.

Last week I went out into the woods on a long overnight backpacking trip. After about five hours of hiking, I realized I had stopped thinking. My brain was quiet. Yet I was traversing complex terrain seemingly making millions of micro decisions of where I was going next, how not to fall off a cliff, twist my ankle, etc. All of this done through some intuitive knowing that came from within my body. I did not have to use my intelligence every step of the way. Yes, it would kick in from time to time but it usually distracted me from the actual task at hand.

So what is that thing that drives us forward?

If you were to train a robotic system with a highly complex large language model how to scale a mountain, it would have to analyze each and every step, pouring through the reams of training data to predict the best next step. As humans, we do not have to do that.

There is a difference between calculating each move to predict the next best action and a deeper knowing of what serves us best. The former is what I’ve become deeply interested in over the last year.

It’s like A.I. has surpassed the intelligence contained in our minds while possessing almost none of the intelligence contained in being alive.

Your body isn’t merely carrying your brain around. There are things like perception, interoception (our body’s inner sense), emotion, motor learning, hormone signals, autonomic responses and accumulated energy that lives within the body.

So what is this deeper knowing that does not live in our brain?

Do we call it intuition? Do we call instinct? Do we call it wisdom?

We’ve never had a good word for it.

For the sake of this article, we’ll call it instinct. Intelligence, artificial or not, often gets in the way of that instinct.

There is a long history of viewing instincts as animalistic. Almost as evil, primal. Animals run on instinct. Humans used intelligence to override their dark instincts. But within each of us, there is great capacity to be compassionate and to be evil. By only looking at the darker parts of our instincts and overriding them, we’re in danger of throwing out the beautiful parts too.

I would argue that it was instinct, not intelligence that saved humanity from self destruction the last time we unleashed a technology of this magnitude. When we created the nuclear bomb, in order to circumvent mutual destruction, it was our instinct for personal and species survival that brought the world to heel. We needed to feel the magnitude of millions of deaths in order to activate our intelligence and problem solving capabilities. It started with feeling, not thought. We need to tap into that again.

Remember that there were roughly ten thousand generations of homo sapiens that came before you. Each one with a breadth of lived experience that we cannot even begin to fathom.

Science also shows us that every life form on earth comes from the same raw materials so it’s not a huge leap to extend that further beyond homo sapiens.

The intuition you have, the instincts you feel, are an unbroken lineage of reproduction and survival stretching roughly four billion years.

And yet we look to a machine we created for the answers?

We like to say that we’ve trained these models on all of human history. That is wildly incorrect. Humans started writing things down only five thousand-ish years ago. Ninety-eight percent of the human story happened before anyone wrote anything down. And they only documented less than 0.0000001% of what was actually happening in the human experience. Then only thirty five years ago we created the worldwide web and then tried to fill it with a second-hand, synthetic version of history and the human experience. That is what these models are trained on, a fraction of a fraction of written and documented history without any of the feelings associated with the events that took place.

Have we confused the intelligence that we can articulate with the total intelligence of a living organism?

The feelings that happen when an event takes place, that is what imprints into our instincts/intuition. The pain, the fear, the love, the ecstasy, the joy. If something ingested your personal story without any of the feelings that you felt throughout your life, would that thing be able to truly help you build a happier, healthier, more meaningful life? No, it could guide you to what you think you want externally but it could not guide you to what makes you feel most alive and connected internally. How could it? It does not know what the feeling of being alive and connected feels like.

So what does this all mean?

After this decade of acceleration, we will enter The Age after Intelligence. An era where we are no longer the most intelligent thing on earth. Already a human child born today will grow up in a world where humans are no longer the most intelligent thing on earth. This is the first generation where that is true.

Thinking, from here on out, will be optional for the thinking human.

Let that sink in.

Will we teach them to go to the most intelligent thing for answers? In our current frameworks/understanding that would be logical. We teach children to ask more intelligent siblings or adults for answers when they don’t know things. And if mom and dad don’t have the answers but artificial intelligence does, how long until they stop asking mom and dad?

This new intelligence will raise this next generation. It already is. Are we ok with that?

Or will we still put weight into intuition and instinct? And how will we help them foster that? How will we teach them how to feel? That is what makes us human. And it’s so much wiser than any prediction machine.

This destabilizing time period will require us to raise a generation of philosophers. To me a philosopher is someone who refuses to outsource their responsibility of understanding reality. By going through the process of wrestling with reality, it changes the person doing the wrestling. That’s what fosters that intuition.

There is deep, deep wisdom in our intuition. Wisdom from the lived experience of four and a half billion years of evolution on earth. Intelligence only turns to wisdom through lived experience, through feeling it. Somehow our bodies and souls can feel and tap into that inherited wisdom when we get quiet enough.

I fear that in this next phase of evolution, we will completely lose our instinct/intuition in favor of intelligence. I know this because it happened to me. It only took me ten short years to completely lose touch with my instinct/intuition. That internal magic wasn’t fast enough for the life I was leading and I did not have the patience or stillness to listen to it. A bought into the lie of modern life that intelligence, money, success, status and speed were the answer. I gave everything I had and more to those things. And it left me unable to feel. I was just an intelligent thing with all the answers and the inability to feel, does that sound familiar?

I know it’s not just me that is feeling this way. I believe that you can feel it happening too.

Now I feel that it’s important to state that I’m not an anti-technologist by any stretch of imagination. We will always progress forward, AI is here to stay. There is not going back. It’s foolish to wish to go backwards (as nice as that may sound). To me it feels like AI is giving us access to all of humanity’s recorded answers precisely at the moment that we most need to learn how to arrive at our own.

Put another way, we can automate many things. But we cannot automate the very process through which wisdom is formed. We must live our questions if we want to lead meaningful lives and figure out how to navigate the challenges we face.

I do not ask you to blindly believe me either. But I would encourage you to go find out for yourself. You can run your own personal experiment. It’s actually quite simple.

Completely disconnect yourself from technology in all forms, do not give yourself access to any answer machines. Get quiet. Get still. If possible, get out into nature. Do this for forty eight hours. And ask yourself one of the bigger questions I mentioned above:

What is intelligence for?

When I get access to unlimited intelligence, what is worth pointing it at?

In a future where intelligence allows me to become anything, what is worth becoming?

Is there something greater at play than intelligence?

It may not work at first. It will feel deeply uncomfortable. Your brain and nervous system have been hijacked and it needs time to reset. But eventually, I am confident that as your monkey brain quiets down. You will begin to feel your way into answers, not think your way into them. This was never more obvious than when I was meditating for ten plus hours a day in India.

You may get thoughts but they’ll feel as if they are coming from some place higher. Some instinct, some intuition, something deeper that you’ve been disconnected from.

The first time you try this, you may just get a taste. It took me about nine months of disconnection to really start to tap into my own deeper wisdom. But I know it’s there and it’s there for all of us.

Again, I do not claim to know what this deeper form of knowing is. But I know enough to be deeply suspicious about the idea that everything worth knowing about being human can be captured in language and fed into a machine.

We know more than we can say. We feel more than we can explain. And maybe some things can only be understood by being alive.

Perhaps science will eventually give us better language for it. But for now, it requires some level of faith. Just like the old stories/religions of the past required faith.

I know it’s a complicated word. Faith. I, too, have my own reservations around that word, but I do think we need it now.

Faith that there is something larger at play that we do not yet understand, something that connects us all and that we are part of. It lives within us. All of us. We are it and it is us.

Faith that there is something that makes us human beyond intelligence, something that all natural life on earth shares.

If we don’t have faith in that, we are in real danger of losing it before we ever understand it. I believe if we lose that, we are no longer part of the natural world. And we will lose our ability to tap into the natural world’s wisdom.

Reconnecting with that natural wisdom is the single most important thing we can do as humanity navigates its most challenging period in history.

Intelligence will not save humanity, wisdom might.

latest.podcast.episode.

Sharing this episode again in case you missed it. I sit down with neuroscientist and best selling author of The Dose Effect, TJ Power. It’s one of my favorite episodes I’ve recorded in a very long time.

Full episode can be found here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Thanks for reading to the end. I know there are a million and one things vying for your attention these days so it means a lot that you’ve decided to spend some of that attention here.

I write to encourage discussion. I do not have the answers but I try to start conversation for those also looking for them.

If this was helpful, please consider liking, commenting or sharing it so that it reaches more people who may need to hear the message.

I appreciate each and every one of you.

All love,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)