The name “Artificial General Intelligence” assumes general intelligence already exists. Nature invented it in us, and AI is trying to copy it.
But we aren’t general intelligences, not on our own. Our brains are piles of evolved instincts, as much as a squirrel’s or a hawk’s. I’ve long argued for zoocentrism over homocentrism, much as heliocentrism replaced geocentrism. Humans aren’t some special exception to how animal brains work.
What looks like general intelligence in us comes from culture, which evolved to harness those instincts for jobs they were never selected for. In my book Harnessed, I argued that speech exploits our hearing, writing our visual recognition machinery, and music our auditory mechanisms for tracking movement. Mathematics, logic, and programming build on these culturally evolved tools. A brain by itself doesn’t do calculus. A brain plus thousands of years of cultural technology does.
So human general intelligence is a chimera: non-general biology plus the culture that harnesses it. It’s real, and it’s general, because those cultural tools can be pointed at almost any problem. But it’s spread across brains, books, and institutions, with a seam between the biological part and the cultural part.
Then we trained AI on its output. Not on the instincts, and not on the long history of how culture learned to harness them, just on everything the whole system produces. That was an enormous shortcut. We didn’t have to understand intelligence, only learn from what it makes.
And what came out has no seam. It’s one massive associative network, with whatever traces of the instincts it picked up tangled into the cultural content in the same weights. Fused, not chimeric.
That may make today’s AI the first general intelligence in a single system, perhaps the first anywhere. And as far as we know, every general intelligence that has ever existed is artificial in some sense: the one culture grew over thousands of years, and the one we built from its output.
Nature evolved specialized intelligences. Culture harnessed them into general intelligence. AI fused the results into one brain.