For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) "sin-gularity" [1] has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence [2], consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions [3] or "intelligence explosions" [4], our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).
By its nature, intelligence is high-dimensional and relational, not a single quantity that must be unambiguously less or greater than human scale. In fact, it is unclear what we even mean by "human scale," given that our intelligence is already a collective property, not an individual one. Recent advances in agentic Al show us once again that intelligence has always fundamentally involved the interaction of distinctive, distributed perspectives [5], and it is
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… (interesting) #AI #thought #societies #perspectives