Commodity Intelligence

What Is Intelligence?

It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this ...

The Use of Knowledge in (AGI) Society

How to build to break the intelligence curse

A Collectivist, Economic Vision for AI

Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word “intelligence” is being used as a North Star for the development of this technology, with human cognition viewed as a baseline. This view neglects the fact that humans are social animals and that much of our intelligence is social and cultural in origin. Moreover, failing to properly situate aspects of intelligence at the social level contributes to the treatment of the societal consequences of technology as an afterthought. The path forward is not merely more data and compute, and not merely more attention paid to cognitive or symbolic representations, but a thorough blending of economic and social concepts with computational and inferential concepts at the level of algorithm design. , The recent focus of AI has been on the exploitation of massive data to mimic and augment human cognitive capabilities. A complementary focus is provided by the social and economic aspects of intelligence.

The Intelligence Curse

This series examines the incoming crisis of human irrelevance and provides a map towards a future where people remain the masters of their destiny.

Make ‘em dumb, sell ‘em smarts

Sam Altman wants intelligence to be a utility that you pay him for

Guy on Twitter / X

If the "price" of intelligence is going to zero, what does that do to the "prices" of rationality, and of wisdom? pic.twitter.com/d0TR3SITfJ— Guy (@nosilverv) June 8, 2026

What is Intelligence? | Antikythera

Intelligence Per Watt: A Study of Local Intelligence Efficiency

Jon Saad-Falcon*, Avanika Narayan*, John Hennessy, Azalia Mirhoseini, Chris Ré

A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI

Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word ``intelligence'' is being...

How ‘Jagged Intelligence’ Can Reframe the A.I. Debate

A.I. has always been compared to human intelligence, but that may not be the right way to think about it. What it does well can help predict what jobs it may replace.

Comprehension Debt - the hidden cost of AI generated code.

Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering.

Our Spreadsheet Overlords

Weatherby argues that the current discourse around AI, especially the buzz around “artificial general intelligence,” is a distraction from its actual impact: the expansion of bureaucracy through massive data systems…

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies

Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past , Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to revolve around whether large models are intelligent, autonomous agents. Some AI researchers and commentators speculate that we are on the cusp of creating agents with artificial general intelligence (AGI), a prospect anticipated with both elation and anxiety. There have also been extensive conversations about cultural and social consequences of large models, orbiting around two foci: immediate effects of these systems as they are currently used, and hypothetical futures when these systems turn into AGI agents—perhaps even superintelligent AGI agents. But this discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. Combining ideas from social and behavioral sciences with computer science can help us to understand AI systems more accurately. Large models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated.

Cognitive Farmsteading

The message of the AI medium is intellectual rural domesticity