Doc Searls Weblog

How about mintelligence?

We need different words for human and machine intelligence.

The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can’t measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you’d get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn’t. (I speak as a former schoolkid whose known IQ scores had an 80-point range—and was at different times rewarded for being smart and punished for being dumb. Fact: I was both all along. So are we all.)

The machine kind is a quantity. You can measure it in various ways, but economically the AI commodities for sale are called tokens. Kieth Teare visits this fact at length and depth in Intelligence: Who Owns it? Excerpt:

We should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.

Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.
Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.

Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.

Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.

If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?

He concludes,

My view is this:

The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.

But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.

As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.

The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.

The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.

An important read, even if you disagree with some of it. My main issue is differentiating between the human and machine forms of intelligence. We’ve always had a word for the former. We need a new word for the latter.