“[...] humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
 

 

 
As AI becomes increasingly more of an influence in many realms of life at higher speeds than expected - whether we are thinking about loss of jobs and the ripple effects of that into the economy, or tech addiction and the belief-behavior manipulation that AI is capable of, there are new realms of exploration that will also become important to us. 
This is especially the case if we wish to create conditions for ourselves that will sustain us into the future in terms of jobs/work, lifestyle, mental health and Human Thriving.

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The beauty of Artificial Intelligence is that it pushes us to also more deeply understand the nature of Intelligence itself. 
What is intelligence and how are humans set apart from other species and machines?*  As physicist David Deutsch says, we are universal constructors - our intelligence is generalized and generalizable - making us capable of adapting to any corner of any ecosystem.
*(I’ll be covering the concept of intelligence in an upcoming episode)
 
Intelligence is a complex notion.  Marvin Minsky, an AI pioneer, in a 1998 interview with Edge, talked about intelligence as a "suitcase word":
“all of us use these [terms] to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can’t yet explain.”
 
Like a suitcase that's packed full of many different things, some are related, some aren't. Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe institute also reflects this In a SFI podcast series on intelligence:
“there's no single thing that intelligence is. It's a whole bunch of different capabilities and ways of being that perhaps are not just one single thing that you could either have more of or less of or get to the level of something. It's much more of a complex notion. There's a lot of different hallmarks that people think of when they think of intelligence” 
 

 The more we talk about intelligence the more we might see a few key themes emerge...

That humans are still pretty special in terms of what we are able to do with our minds and bodies;
That the word intelligence is a ‘suitcase word’ and that it is such a complex notion that even trying to define it helps us explore our own and others’ paradigms and capacities for complex perspectives;
That the body and embodied intelligence are massively important and often ignored a missing from many explorations about intelligence;
The more we talk about complexity and explore the Nature of Intelligence, the better chance me have at designing Systems and Environments that actually facilitate on highest capacities for learning, resilience and adaptation

 

Our human intelligence, unlike AI, is embodied… it is enfleshed and interacts with sensory-motor, visceral-kinesthetic,