Living with Intelligence

Recently I'm seeing a lot of content around how to get the best out of AI. Even Open AI are figuring this out, and kindly published a very helpful Prompt Engineering guide (link in comments) with advice such as instructing the model to take its time, or describe an "inner monologue" to reveal its logic.

This trend is helpful, but ultimately limited in scope. Trying to control AI is like seeking to catch the wind - even leaders in the field admit it's beyond them. It's likely that sooner or later we'll see a shift in the conversation from leveraging to living with Artificial Intelligence. (Serving or merging with AI are other options, of course, but let's not go there for now...).

This then raises the question, are we forgetting how to live with the other much more ancient Intelligences that surround us?

Intelligence is often associated with IQ, a measure of mental agility, which has tended to be the focus of education systems. Emotional Intelligence has equally gained attention in recent years, while practices such as yoga nurture somatic wisdom, attuning with the Intelligence of the body. Beyond individuals, there is a certain Intelligence (and often folly) of communities. And on a wider scale, we could even talk about Planetary Intelligence - natural systems have immense complexity and depth, which we are still only beginning to understand (see Ways of Being by James Bridle for a thorough discussion of this topic). Perhaps, in the end, there is only one Intelligence, and it's all the divisions that are artificial?

This insight is something that indigenous communities and wisdom traditions of the world have been stewarding millennia. As we learn to live with new types of Intelligence, their voices also need to be heard. If mythical language and ritual are barriers to dialogue, we need to look for new common vocabulary and shared tools.

So here's a prompt for discussion (or Chat GPT): how can we broaden our understanding of Intelligence and discover the roles it plays through us?