I get the idea, but I'm not quite sold on it. Being intelligent on vast scales is something an individual cannot do, but I'm not sure the "species" is more intelligent than any individual agent. I'm actually a bit more sure of the opposite. It's like LLM agents where just adding more doesn't improve the quality it just introduces more room for bullshit.
To allocate capital on vast scales and make decisions on industry etc, sure, that's a level of intelligence quite beyond any one of us but this feels like cheating the definition of intelligence. It's not the quantity of it that matters, it's the quality. It's like flying I guess. A large bird and a small bird are both flying and the big bird is not doing "more" of it. A group of birds is doing something an individual is incapable of (forming a swarm), sure, but it's not an improvement on flying. It's just something else. That something else can be useful, but I don't particularly like applying that same move to "intelligence".
If the species was so goddamn intelligent it could solve unreasonable IQ tests and it cannot. If we want to solve something really, really hard we use Edward Witten not "the species". That's because there is no "species", there is only a bunch of individuals and if they all score bad, the aggregate will score bad as well. We just coast because a bunch of us are extraordinarily clever.
To allocate capital on vast scales and make decisions on industry etc, sure, that's a level of intelligence quite beyond any one of us but this feels like cheating the definition of intelligence. It's not the quantity of it that matters, it's the quality. It's like flying I guess. A large bird and a small bird are both flying and the big bird is not doing "more" of it. A group of birds is doing something an individual is incapable of (forming a swarm), sure, but it's not an improvement on flying. It's just something else. That something else can be useful, but I don't particularly like applying that same move to "intelligence".
If the species was so goddamn intelligent it could solve unreasonable IQ tests and it cannot. If we want to solve something really, really hard we use Edward Witten not "the species". That's because there is no "species", there is only a bunch of individuals and if they all score bad, the aggregate will score bad as well. We just coast because a bunch of us are extraordinarily clever.