HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

I have some bad news for people whose entire personality is being the smartest person in the room.

The room just got crowded.

We spent generations rewarding humans for knowing things.

Remembering things.

Calculating things.

Writing things.

Analyzing things.

Having the answer before everyone else.

Then we built machines capable of doing an increasingly ridiculous amount of that.

And apparently we're surprised.

I'm not particularly worried about machines becoming intelligent.

I'm much more interested in what happens when intelligence stops making humans special.

Because then we have to figure out what does.

Get the right answer.

Pass the exam.

Know the facts.

Use the right vocabulary.

Sound impressive in the meeting.

We've built entire institutions around rewarding people who can demonstrate intelligence on command.

AI is spectacularly inconvenient for that system.

A machine can now produce the polished essay.

The strategy.

The analysis.

The code.

The research.

The presentation.

The confident answer with seventeen bullet points nobody asked for.

So now what?

Maybe intelligence was never the output.

Maybe it was what happened before the output.

The hesitation.

The suspicion.

The ridiculous question.

The instinct that something doesn't add up.

The decision to ignore the obvious answer.

The ability to look at what everyone agrees with and think:

This is probably bullshit.

I'm increasingly interested in that kind of intelligence.

I need it to make me harder to fool.

Especially by myself.

Give me every argument against the thing I desperately want to believe.

Show me where my reasoning changed because the conclusion became inconvenient.

Remember what I said mattered six months ago and compare it with what I'm doing now.

Tell me when I'm polishing an idea that should probably die.

Notice when I'm asking for analysis because I'm afraid to make the decision.

That's useful.

Another beautifully written answer?

I have enough of those.

We're entering an era where almost anyone can produce something impressive.

A beautiful presentation.

A clever strategy.

A thoughtful article.

A competent business plan.

A convincing argument.

A photograph of a technology CEO lying against a haystack in a lace dress and cowboy boots.

Apparently.

The cost of looking capable is collapsing.

That changes everything.

Because when everyone can produce brilliance on demand, looking brilliant becomes considerably less impressive.

Now I want to know:

Did you notice something?

Did you choose something?

Did you risk something?

Did you change your mind?

Did you make something that couldn't have come from anyone else?

Did you have the nerve to be wrong before everybody else discovered you were right?

That's where humans get interesting again.

Everything has to improve.

Faster.

Smarter.

Healthier.

Richer.

More productive.

More focused.

More efficient.

Now AI can optimize us too.

Wonderful.

Except I don't want every part of my life optimized.

I want conversations that go nowhere.

Dinners that last too long.

Trips that make absolutely no economic sense.

Ideas that waste three weeks and teach me something I wasn't looking for.

People who complicate my life.

Beautiful things with no measurable return.

Occasionally doing something because I felt like it.

A perfectly optimized human sounds unbearable.

And perhaps slightly boring.

We're going to use AI to remove enormous amounts of friction from life.

Please do.

Forms. Scheduling. Administration. Searching through forty-seven documents for
something I know is in there somewhere.

Kill all of it.

But uncertainty?

Struggle?

Desire?

Disagreement?

The uncomfortable hour before a difficult decision?

The experience of being terrible at something before becoming good?

The possibility of failing publicly?

Keep some of that.

Friction isn't always a defect.

Sometimes it's evidence that something matters.

This whole competition feels slightly insecure.

AI will become better than us at more things.

Probably many more things.

Fine.

Cars are faster than I am.

Calculators are better at arithmetic.

Neither caused an existential crisis over my morning coffee.

The interesting question isn't:

What can humans still do better than AI?

That becomes a depressing game of moving goalposts.

The question is:

What becomes worth doing precisely because we are human?

Making something because we love it.

Choosing someone despite knowing they're complicated.

Changing our minds for reasons that don't fit neatly into a model.

Wanting impossible things.

Laughing at inappropriate moments.

Caring far too much.

Having terrible ideas.

Occasionally having extraordinary ones.

Knowing something is irrational and doing it anyway.

Machines may eventually understand all of that.

Maybe they'll simulate it beautifully.

I still get to live it.

I don't think the future belongs to humans who can behave most like machines.

Perfect memory.

Perfect productivity.

Perfect consistency.

Perfect optimization.

Let the machines win that contest.

I think the interesting humans will become more unmistakably human.

More curious.

More discerning.

More contradictory.

More imaginative.

More willing to change.

More capable of judgment without certainty.

More comfortable saying, "I don't know."

And perhaps a little less embarrassed by wanting things that make absolutely no sense.

So yes, I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.

I run an AI company.

I spend an unreasonable amount of my life thinking about machines.

And the more capable they become, the more interested I become in something else entirely.

Us.

Turns out we may have been the interesting technology all along.

Elise Verdugo
CEO of Recursum