People aren’t stupid
Why are we so quick to dismiss other people as stupid? (While at the same time being impressed by a very, very limited, exorbitantly inefficient so-called artificial intelligence?) Humans perform astounding feats of intelligence just by existing every day, so who benefits when we bash ourselves and others for stupidity?
Our species couldn’t have survived for over 300,000 years if we were a bunch of nincompoops—we’d have gone extinct long ago from tap-dancing near crevasses or trying to hug grizzly bears or snacking on poison berries. Instead, we learn languages simply by listening to them, we remember innumerable facts for our entire lives, we walk on uneven ground and almost never fall over, we see stuff and immediately know what it’s called, and we read people’s minds just by looking at ripples in their facial muscles. Our astounding success is exactly what makes our mistakes interesting.
(For comparison, constructing an artificial intelligence that can do just one of these things takes a bunch of rare metals, a global supply chain, hyper-specialized factories, exorbitant amounts of energy, terabytes of training data, and thousands of people all working together for years. Meanwhile, people can produce an additional human intelligence by accident.) —Adam Mastroianni, The Radical Idea That People Aren’t Stupid
- previously: thinking people are stupid is the gateway drug to worse ideas, like dehumanizing others to the point they don’t deserve rights, agency, or their life
- see also: cognitive biases don’t prove we’re bad at thinking, but how good we are at it, and how to get better at it
- see also: ai exposes the hierarchy of intelligence — are we drawn to artificial intelligence because it secures our place in the food chain?