AI Is Making Us Smarter

Or Is It Just Me?

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In recent months I have often felt somewhat like that library janitor in “One for the Books”, a 1986 episode of the Spielberg-produced TV series Amazing Stories, who acquires the ability osmotically to absorb the information on the stacks surrounding him. He collapses, ultimately, like the victim of a lightning-strike. His mortal brain just can’t take it, you see.

I’m not sure my mortal brain can take it either. But at least until I collapse, or the world collapses, I do believe that we are now in the midst of the most significant cognitive revolution in the history of our species — not just a revolution in our “prosthetic knowledge”, where we can in some qualified sense be said potentially to “know” whatever fact we might be able to access within five seconds or so of pulling out our phones, but a revolution in the sense of being able, now, to absorb a significantly expanded body of learning into our God-given wetware, which then quickly becomes integrated with the totality of our internal resources for making sense of the world.

In sum, I don’t know how you’re using AI, or whether you can relate to this experience, but as for me, at least, I cannot shake the feeling that we are not only conjuring a superintelligence into being; we are also coming to share, ourselves, as individual human beings, in that same superintelligence. To be clear —pace Nick Bostrom and, more recently, Mark Zuckerberg—, I personally do not believe the notion of machine superintelligence, considered independently of the way human beings are interacting with the machines, is coherent in the least. Yet I do think the term is at least helpful in understanding the transformation of the human mind itself that is already occurring as a result of the sudden proliferation of these new cognitive prostheses. We are the ones who are becoming superintelligent; “machine superintelligence” is a misnomer, but it does point to something real.

In partial demonstration of this claim, below the fold I provide some “receipts”, in the form of two pdf documents, well over 500 pages in total, containing the transcripts of my exchanges, this past month alone, with ChatGPT and DeepSeek (some pages have been deleted that contained personal information; I sincerely I hope I found them all!).