Biological Intelligence is Emotional

I was thrilled to meet up with Gašper Beguš in La Jolla today. We first connected a while ago when I was studying crow language and culture and he was deciphering the mysteries of whale communication. His stunning research is featured on the front page of The Guardian.

We talked about Gašper's study of dead languages and what reconstructing the sound can tell us about humanity. This curiosity led to his work with animal communication. We talked about intelligence and cognition. We talked about Color Mindset, which led to a discussion about synesthesia, a condition in which one form of sensory stimulation sparks another. For example, some people with synesthesia associate specific colors with letters or numbers. I associate colors with everything, which is how Power Pairs came into being (and one of the many reasons why I love developing the Color Mindset philosophy with Dr. Deirdre Kelly).

While AI continues to disrupt society, paving the way for apocalyptic science fiction visions of various kinds, it is also enabling a scientific revolution. AI has gotten so advanced at mathematics that it's possible at some point humans may lose all touch with mathematical understanding. It can produce sentences and string them into a structure resembling a novel. But some of us will stand with our hands cupped around the flickering flame of what it means to be human, in all our messy, brave transformation.

To me, AI is Applied Imagination, not just artificial intelligence. We should use our tools instead of letting our tools use us.

"Biological intelligence is emotional," Gašper said. "These things [our tools] are not emotional. it's just this perfect thing that has always has the right answer." He laughed. "We will crave the imperfection."

Gašper's wife Nina Beguš is the author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI.

Color Code Yourself if You're Curious