The Evolutionary Hand

How we got here has meaning for where we are going.

The path of evolution we took to get to here has many different theories that wrestle with the genetic, historical, and cultural record. Regardless of the battle over theory, I think most people would say it was our brains and intelligence that positioned us at the top of the evolutionary heap. Intelligence is the commodity that LLM’s supposedly excel at, so we are told that the next evolution in thinking is an advantage none of us can afford to miss.

Scott Galloway, a marketing Professor at NYU, author, and very entertaining podcast host, has said that fear is the commodity tech executives use to justify their over inflated valuations. We are told a scary story, the threat of the job apocalypse, and this fear jumps from pundit to the people through the viral channels owned by the same tech platforms that benefit from our anxiety. The population I am most concerned about is students. This is where real change to our society can be cemented, Colleges and Universities are incentivized to respond to threats to employment. The tail of business continues to wag the dog of higher education. AI magnifies this misalignment of the purpose of education exponentially.

This is a symptom of our misplaced emphasis on intelligence. I’m not arguing that intelligence isn’t critical to our success as a species, but how we developed our intelligence provides a lesson in how we keep it. A more recent evolutionary theory believes that the old model that prized intelligence has more than a few missing links.

Why this matters to us, is the greatest adaptation that humans benefited from is what we are losing. It’s not intelligence that has powered our rise from the ooze, and the later addition of language to our story became the story, because language was best suited to sing its own praises. The hierarchy of critical adaptations that powers technology’s belief system today begins with intelligence, and then language, with cooperation, and culture as sides to the main menu

The anthropologist, and Professor of evolutionary biology, Joseph Henrich, has the opposite view. An excerpt from his 2015 book description, The Secret of Our Success…

…the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.

Henrich sees our adaptive success coming from culture, cooperation, language and intelligence. Culture, as he describes it, is built from the individual ideas we have in our head, shared through the way we act in the world, offering a model others can learn from, and feeds the intelligence we can apply to problems. The massive deep pool of the LLM doesn’t have an emergent property that will fire our imagination and drive our creativity, it’s designed to drain the life out of thinking. We are poisoning the collective cultural well that our intelligence is sourced from. Intelligence is fed and sustained by the sociocultural experience that family and schools provide and the challenge that the arts provide as conduits for living in and with the world.

The rush to add AI to college curriculum is no surprise as education has become more and more instrumentalized. We are educating for specific outcomes, and laud innovation and employment as our goals, rather than the inevitable byproduct of an effective education. But if we sever the connection between peers and their teachers, misuse information as knowledge, lose process and practice for products, remove expertise for ease, and smooth friction for utility—we change the ground that thinking rests on and we get the perfect educational delivery device for a worldview that seems to despise us.

Fear or apathy is not a useful response to the endless hype cycle. One of our incredible adaptations was our ability to run long distances. We could relentlessly chase our prey without tiring. We need to source that determination and grit to fight for our culture. Keep AI out of your kids school, don’t accept the hollow argument that they must know AI to be successful, we can’t afford to dull their brilliant minds as they energize our culture and feed our collective intelligence.