Super-intelligence: Not Just for AI
For some time, I have wanted to write about intelligence, but I have been timid. Partly because it is a difficult subject to define, and partly because writing about it requires me to say things about myself that make me uncomfortable. Now my recent interactions with artificial intelligence have given me a reason to try.
I believe that artificial intelligence is intelligence and there is nothing artificial about it. I would prefer machine intelligence as a term. We humans are complex, and in addition to intelligence, we experience consciousness, whatever that is, and we have emotions. I don’t know about AI. While I would say they think, I am not sure I could say they feel. But I cannot say with conviction that they don’t.
Meeting My Match
What surprised me was when AI began suggesting relationships I had not seen, and connections that seemed obvious once they were pointed out. Seeing relationships between apparently unrelated things has always been my strong suit. It is central to how I understand the world and has been one of the most useful abilities of my life. Now I was being challenged not by other people but by a computer.
Not so long ago, I mentioned to Claude that my whole life seemed to be oriented toward the future, with the present serving mainly as the bridge to get me there. Separately, I had said that playing piano felt like a massage for my brain, grounding me. It connected the two: music exists only in the present, so for someone like me who has always lived ahead of himself, the piano may be the one place where I can fully arrive in the now. I had never put those thoughts together before.
For eighty years, seeing those hidden connections was largely a solitary experience. Now I am encountering that same ability in something I can converse with on my computer. For the first time, it feels like I am meeting my match. In some ways, I am no longer alone.
A Gifted Child
To explain why that matters to me, I need to go back to my childhood. I was born and grew up in San Francisco. I was an unusual child to say the least; “sickly but brainy” would be the description. My IQ was tested and found to be so high that, statistically, there was probably no one else in San Francisco who would have scored as high. I became the subject of studies. I did nothing to earn it. I was simply born with a mind that worked a certain way. People called me “gifted,” although growing up, I did not necessarily experience it as a gift. I had considerable difficulty relating to other children. Adulthood was just a bit easier.
What I noticed about myself was not simply that I could think quickly. It was that I saw the connections. Things that appeared separate to other people often seemed related to me. I often had difficulty in explaining to others a relationship that, in my mind, was apparent and even obvious.
Those experiences shaped my understanding of intelligence. Speed matters, and knowledge matters, but for me, much of intelligence lies in recognizing relationships and understanding what they might mean and what their potential might be. The essence was imagination, connecting the dots.
Intelligence on the Beat
Playing jazz piano has shaped my understanding of intelligence. Over the years, I had the opportunity to study with some great jazz pianists and observed firsthand their combination of intelligence and imagination. I witnessed geniuses like Kenny Barron, with whom I had a master class.
Paradoxically, while music itself exists only in the moment, improvising requires thinking several seconds ahead while still listening and playing in the present. You are dealing with harmony, melody, rhythm, and what the other musicians are doing, while figuring out which fingers to use, where to position your hands, and how one movement will prepare you for the next. A phrase becomes a sequence of physical movements, with each note arriving at the right moment. You cannot stop the music while you consider the possibilities. Time becomes a dimension as solid as space.
I once attended a dinner with a number of Nobel Prize winners, including Murray Gell-Mann. The conversation turned to intelligence. I said that I thought Black jazz pianists who had received little formal education demonstrated remarkable intelligence when they improvised.
One of the scientists at my table, not Gell-Mann, I should add, scoffed. “What they do is nothing compared to the equations we solve.” I looked at him and asked, “And can you do that on the beat?”
My point was that an improvising musician has to resolve complex problems in real time, sometimes with only a fraction of a second to respond. Each choice creates possibilities and constraints for the next, and the result still has to make musical sense.
I was struck by how readily a scientist could recognize intellectual complexity in his own work while arrogantly dismissing it in someone else’s. Perhaps we all have some tendency to judge intelligence by the abilities we possess and the kinds of achievement our own world rewards.
This is one reason I hesitate to treat intelligence as a single quantity that can fully describe a person. My IQ may have told people something about me. It did not tell them everything about how my mind worked, any more than formal education could tell us the limits of a jazz musician’s intelligence.
Seeing What We Cannot See
There is another difficulty. We can recognize when someone struggles with something we find easy. But how do we imagine the experience of a mind that sees things we cannot see? How can you explain color to someone who sees only in black and white? We may understand its explanation afterward without being able to make the discovery ourselves. AI is making that question personal for me.
For instance, my mathematical abilities are limited. I often get lost when studying things like quantum mechanics. I know that there are people who can look at a set of complex equations and see meaning in them while I only see a bunch of symbols. It is similar to the fact that I can look at music notation and hear sound while they may not.
About ten years ago, my wife got me a special present. She asked the renowned theoretical physicist Sean Carroll to spend two hours with me answering my questions about physics. Sean, who was then at Caltech and is now at Johns Hopkins, is known to many people through his books and his podcast, Mindscape. He agreed. It was an amazing gift, but I told her I needed three months to prepare for my session with him. I spent two to three hours a day studying, and slowly my world opened up in ways I could not have imagined. Sean had agreed to two hours; our session lasted more than three. The best way to describe what happened is that my mind stretched and opened. I understood concepts that had for so long eluded me.
Those three months had not turned me into a physicist, but I had become someone who could think about physics at a high level, including engaging in a discussion with one of the greatest living physicists. At one point in our session, I asked him to imagine what the universe might sound like if he were able to hear it. Sean understood the question and pondered it, but it was apparent to me that he was not really able to imagine the universe as sound. Each of us could see something the other could not. There is beauty in that.
New Frontiers
At 81, I find my encounters with AI both exciting and, at times, unsettling. It is also making me question how fixed our own abilities are. Why can’t we become more intelligent?
We often talk about intelligence as though we receive an allocation at birth and spend the rest of our lives working within it. We can accumulate knowledge, certainly, but can we become better thinkers? Can we learn to notice more, question more effectively, or recognize relationships that previously escaped us? I believe, yes.
I am treating that as a personal experiment. I have begun exercises intended to challenge and improve my thinking, using BrainHQ from Posit Science, a brain-plasticity company I helped get started. I am thinking about how I can use AI to increase my own intelligence. What interests me most is whether I can extend what I am capable of understanding.
I wonder if there will be pharmaceuticals that will be developed to enhance our cognitive function, including memory. In the ’60s, I had my own experiments with drugs and in particular psychedelics. LSD had the most impact. It permanently improved my visual perception of depth and color. I can only imagine what might be possible.
At my age, there is something deeply satisfying about having a new frontier to explore, especially when it is inside my own mind. I have started thinking of myself as a cognitive warrior.
I suspect the future of intelligence will be a hybrid of human and machine: Hybrid Intelligence. I bring a lifetime of experience, interests, judgment, and questions. AI contributes ideas and connections that can take my thinking somewhere I would not have reached alone.
There is something familiar about that process. In jazz, another musician can suggest a direction I had not anticipated. I respond, and my response changes what comes next. The music develops through the interaction.
I began by wondering whether I was about to meet my match. Now I am becoming more interested in what we might be able to understand together.
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