l;dr: AI doesn’t add “intelligence” as much as it adds “time” to your lived experience.

One of the reasons that people respect their elders is because of the accumulated wisdom that comes from having seen the same thing over and over again.

It’s not because people who have lived a long time have had so many varied experiences that are different than people who have lived a short time. It’s that they have had repeat experiences allowing for the development of enhanced pattern recognition.

After all, for millenia, people would live and die within a small radius, all having similar experiences. It’s not like the youth of the village went to Nepal for 6 months of trekking.

If every fall, the rains come, pretty soon you realize that come late Summer, it’s time to start preparing for them.

Why this matters is the topic of Venkatesh Rao’s essay Superhistory, Not Superintelligence.

Venkat makes a compelling argument that the arrival of digital technologies and the AIs that power them from the backend and the front end give us all the ability to benefit from the accumulated wisdom/pattern recognition of others in far greater quantities than we would have previously.

A generation ago, you got the wisdom of the elders from your tribe only.

Today, you can get the wisdom of the elders from every tribe.

What that does, essentially, is help you grow your knowledge of the world at a far greater rate than was previously possible and certainly outside of the realm of most previous humans.

The end result is something that he calls “AI Age.”

My 13 year old daughter was exposed to an iPad when she was 1. There are some definite downsides to that, but she doesn’t know the world without it. Meanwhile, she’s had the accumulated wisdom of every tribe’s elders at her fingertips since then.

As such, while her biological age may be 13, her “AI Age” is something like 25.

In effect, the AI hasn’t really added intelligence to her. Her IQ is her IQ, whatever it is. However, it has added “time” to her life in terms of what she’s gleaned about the world.

[To be fair, with all of the TikToks she has watched, it has probably also shaved off a few, but that’s a different, Dad type of thing.]

If we accept the notion of “Artificial Time” as being added to our biological age/time, we’re soon going to see (if we haven’t already), people who may only be teenagers, but are essentially 100 or 200 (or more) years old when it comes to knowledge.

We’re in the midst of that transformation right now. What it means in terms of politics, society, and culture is anyone’s guess, but I remember telling the teachers at my kids school once, “you have to remember that these kids have grown up assuming the iPad was available to them. They’ve never known otherwise.”

That’s the first time in human history where this is the case and it’s the first decade where AI has gotten so powerful that it is revolutionizing life’s lived experience.

AI is about pattern recognition (that’s what Google Maps does when you type in an address). Humans are about pattern recognition.

Now, we’re putting them together at warp speed and the ones who “get” it the most are the ones who are the youngest.