I had an interesting experience at work a while back involving me and a co-worker who is convinced AI is a fad that will implode on itself and we will all return to the old ways of working. I owed her something that would be mundane and time-consuming to write up so I used AI to do the job for me (which got be about 80% of the way) and I only had to review more inaccuracies. When B reviewed it she found a mistake and pinged me immediately to point out how this was highly problematic because it was AI generated and full of errors and now that increases her effort. It was like she had found that smoking gun she'd been looking for. She had gone through a lot of work to find out mistakes which ended up taking only a few minutes to resolve. In the old days, this task would have taken me a whole day to get to the content to be considered "final". Notwithstanding B's umbrage at my use of "tools", it was only ten minutes of work to produce the first draft and thirty minute to update and and other fifteen to finalize. Still under an hour and it gave me the time to work on things that are more intellectually interesting and creative for me. I never found any joy in doing the routine parts of my job that are hard to delegate and yet fill like a time sink. Like many, I have found a way to escape it. B was deeply unhappy about it all even after we got it over the finish line.
Reading this essay on what is means for humans to be intelligent in the time of AI got me thinking about that situation with B. According to the authors, what is now called for is a dynamic, computational, predictive, and collective process that emerges from the interaction of many specialized parts (neurons, individuals, or agents). It is shaped by social and environmental feedback, and is not limited to biological systems. Intelligence is defined by its function, modeling, predicting, adapting, and cooperating, rather than by its specific implementation or economic output
For instance, when a scientific research team collaborates to address complex issues like climate change or medical breakthroughs, their intelligence is not simply the sum of individual IQs. Instead, it emerges from their ability to share information, predict outcomes, adapt strategies, and integrate diverse perspectives. Research shows that the effectiveness of such groups depends less on individual brilliance and more on the quality of their collaboration, communication, and social perceptiveness.
As such the durable human intelligence is collective, adaptive, and shaped by social and environmental feedback. By refusing to co-operate with me in the process, B had made sure we did not produce something that met the new bar of intelligence. Conversely, there are any number of instances where people from multiple disciplines apply their efforts in coordination (aided by AI) to accomplish novel and useful things that became possible through their collective human intelligence.