For the first time ever, humanity has a thought partner in technology

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In all of human innovation, few inventions rival the iPhone in importance. Not only does it enable access to all the world’s accumulated knowledge, not only does it equip users with once-marvelous tools like the camera, it’s mobile.

You can take it with you.

The iPhone may be seen as the Information Age’s apotheosis, described this way by research database and digital library service EBSCO, “…A period characterized by the rapid expansion of information technology and the Internet, fundamentally changing how individuals access and share information. This era began with the creation of the World Wide Web and gained momentum with the development of personal computers by companies like Microsoft and Apple, making technology more accessible to the general public.”

Access to Adaptation: The Intelligence Shift

Impressive as the iPhone is and the remarkable human epoch it exemplifies as its crowning achievement, both have been eclipsed. In their place is another technology and a new historical period. Both promise to upend what came before in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Welcome to the Intelligence Age.

In a personal essay published last year, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, sought to capture the essence of this moment: “We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence.”

Renowned biologist E. O. Wilson similarly acknowledged the power of collective intelligence. He showed this in his studies of ant colonies where insects combine their efforts, strengths and abilities. “If you have a group of organisms which live together, and they are so tightly organized and united that they develop collectively traits which are similar to traits of an ordinary organism we can call that group superorganisms,” according to NPR.

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Humans differ from ants. Unlike any other species known to Earth, we can self-evolve, using our intellectual aptitude to consciously improve ourselves. Much like AI. In this way, humans and AI differ from ants or any other creatures by being dynamic beings, unconstrained by what came before and capable of self-directed transformation.

This point is key to the Intelligence Age.

AI as Oracle: Dynamic Responding Replaces Static Search

It’s also what separates it from its predecessor, the Information Age. To see how, let’s discuss online search. The phrase “Google it” has become so commonplace that people younger than 20 can scarcely appreciate just how monumental it once was to type in a browser anything you wanted to know about and suddenly get an answer.

Let’s recall Google only arrived on the scene in the 1990s, a blink in the eye in terms of human history. Before that, if you wanted to find something out and no one you knew had the answer you had to go to the library or consult the Encyclopedia. The act of online searching democratized knowledge more profoundly than even Gutenberg’s printing press, enabling publishing at scale. Suddenly, anyone anywhere could access info with the click of a button.

Yet for all its practicality, search was not without its limitations. Its chief hindrance was its static quality. Search for an answer and you may get pages and pages and pages of results. For all that work, it was still up to you as the human counterpart to the machine to synthesize meaning and relevance from the many, many results.

The Intelligence Age does away with such limitations.

There’s a reason more people are turning to AI for answers over search. ChatGPT and similar platforms offer a dynamic experience. They don’t leave you hanging with pages to pore through after you look something up. Like a friendly guide, they direct you to the precise answer you seek. (Perhaps a heat-seeking missile is the better metaphor in that last sentence.)

More helpfully, when more than one answer may apply to a query, AI gives you options, often streamlined with pithy explanations that cut out guesswork. To add to the dynamism of this experience, you can even prompt AI to simplify its answer. (Explain the ontological importance of the Hegelian Dialectic to me as if I were an eighth grader.)

An apter comparison to describe this type of search experience is that of an oracle. Or soothsayer. Nowadays, when people turn to AI for answers, they know they can go deeper with their querying. They aren’t limited to only ask AI for binary, yes or no answers like “Who hosted the TV show Unsolved Mysteries?”

Instead, they can tap into AI’s dynamic reasoning abilities to ask more nuanced, reasoning questions such as “Why might’ve Unsolved Mysteries’ Robert Stack’s evocative voice spooked viewers more than a host with a deadpan delivery?” (Try giving AI that prompt to see for yourself.) Reflecting on this reality, a striking difference between the Information Age and the Intelligence Age emerges. There is a qualitative difference between static Google pages users must investigate versus dynamic answers from an AI oracle capable of contextualizing and drawing its own conclusions.

Learning: The Intelligence Age’s Defining Trait

Though the Intelligence Age currently lacks a physical implement like the iPhone to symbolize this period, it arguably began November 30, 2022, with the release of OpenAI’s free web demo. (Previous iterations GPT-2 in 2019 and GPT-3 in 2020 failed to catch fire with the public.) This time the conversational interface blew up, passing one million users in less than five days.

Since that high-water mark, it feels like every week has only brought more and more consequential tech news, everything from a purported AI arms race between China and the United States to generative AI technology enabling creators to speak videos into being.

Were we to crystallize the one attribute this epoch possesses over its antecedents it would be AI’s unique capacity to learn. This one quality imbues the technology with dynamism. For the first time in known history, people have a technological copilot, one with the capacity for memory and prediction. For all its might, the Industrial Era could only offer brawn at scale. Even the Information Age tapped out in supplying any answer on demand. The Intelligence Age surpasses them all by serving in a novel role: as a thought partner. And not just any thought partner, a complex synthetic mind trained on the vast compendium of all available knowledge.

Beyond Prediction

The Singularity is the term used to describe the theoretical moment when progress’s inexorable curve turns hockey-stick vertical, a future period where technology becomes so unimaginably powerful that the usual predictive rules humanity has relied upon collapse like physics inside a black hole. Even if we never reach that point, daily it grows clearer we are advancing through uncharted territory, amassing cognitive technological abilities that would stun our ancestors. And not just those who saw the Gutenberg Press. We’re talking about those who only lived to see the television’s invention.