Superintelligence

It might not be where we think it is.

As Meta reorganizes its teams around a “Superintelligence Lab” and billions are funneled into the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, a simpler, older question resurfaces: what does it really mean to be intelligent?

In our rush toward the ultimate version, we may have lost sight of the living one. Or rather: we've diminished it.

Reduced it to metrics: performance, computation, optimization. Stripped of the body, the senses, of space and time. As if intelligence lived in spreadsheets. If that were true, Excel would rule the world.

In English, intelligence refers both to understanding and to information gathering, as in intelligence service. But its Latin root, inter-legere, literally means “to read between.” To read between the lines. To connect what has not yet touched. To see what no one else has seen.

When artificial intelligence emerged in the 1960s, some researchers already sensed its ambiguities. Marvin Minsky quipped: “Why should a computer be like a human? After all, airplanes don’t flap their wings.” And Edsger Dijkstra was more cutting: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

In other words: imitating a function does not make it an essence.

But saying it is no longer enough. To claim that AI isn’t truly intelligent is still to fall into the trap of language. Artificial intelligence is a convention, but a convention that, through constant repetition, begins to colonize the imagination. And in the end, we believe what the words suggest.

So then, what does it mean to be intelligent? Perhaps, today, it’s everything the machine still cannot be.

In that sense, Jean Piaget put it perfectly: “Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.”

To be intelligent is to be present, curious, fully and closely attuned to reality: responsive, sensitive, engaged. It’s a quality of presence.

Cinema sometimes gives us powerful expressions of this. Characters who don't understand the world through abstraction, but through immersion. Who don't think from a distance, but from within.

In The Godfather, Don Corleone never says too much. He watches. He waits. He reads between the lines. He senses tension, silence, betrayals barely hinted at.

It’s a slow kind of lucidity. An intelligence born of reality. Almost animal. Entirely human.

Lost in Translation captures the same presence, but in a different register.

Two people out of sync with their surroundings, who don’t connect through words, but through presence. Nothing is explained. Everything is felt. It’s a subtle, invisible intelligence, one that never needs to prove itself.

And then there’s Interstellar: the intelligence of the heart.

When the scientist Brand speaks about Edmunds’ planet, the one where the man she loves is, she’s not defending an emotion. She’s following something deeper.

It could be mistaken for naïveté. But there’s a naïveté that comes before, the kind that believes love is just a feeling, and a naïveté that comes after, the kind that understands it as a cognitive faculty.

Because sometimes, what we feel intensely isn’t a weakness in the face of reason. It’s a step ahead of it.

And that’s where everything shifts.

The love of a vision. Of a future. Of a world yet to be built that no one else can see. And you feel it. You feel it, dammit. And you’re the only one who does. So you keep going, even when everything else says no.

That’s when love changes its face. It’s no longer just what connects. It’s what reveals. Maybe even what elevates.

Love, here, doesn’t bring you back to what’s known. It opens what hasn’t yet been seen. It moves the boundaries. And sometimes, it brings a world into being.

The real mistake wasn’t putting too much faith in machines. It was mistaking output for creation, and in that confusion, dismissing love.

Not as sentiment. As cognition. As vision. As the one form of intelligence no machine can fake.

Maybe love isn’t our flaw. Maybe it’s our edge. Maybe it’s the only superintelligence that was ever real.

MD