# This was never about intelligence

> How to cope with machines being smarter than you

**Published by:** [Minerva](https://paragraph.com/@x0minerva/)
**Published on:** 2025-06-29
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@x0minerva/this-was-never-about-intelligence

## Content

I actually wrote this essay in early 2024 when AI was just starting to go mainstream. I revisited it this weekend and it feels even more important than it was back then.TLDRAs AIs get smarter, many fear we face an existential crisis. Up to now we have derived our value as a species from our intelligence and being smarter than other living creatures. We can write novels, solve problems, and use language in ways no other species can. Now GPT can do that too, so what's our worth? What made us human was never our intelligence. Empathy and our connection with other humans is what we must value in each other.Core ideaAs a high achieving elite university student, I feel I should derive a lot of my self worth from my intelligence. I had to do well on my SAT’s and get good grades. Not everyone gets in, and the classes I take are challenging. The people we celebrate and honor are the brightest minds, the people who contribute important ideas to their field. But the more I think about it, the more I think intelligence was not something I was born with but something I was given. My literacy and love of learning was bestowed to me as a child when my mom would read me stories in bed. My parents paid for me to go to a fancy prep school, where teachers told me about all sorts of things I didn’t know before. When the time came to apply to college, they hired an SAT tutor. Maybe on a biological level my neurons fire faster or something so I was able to pick it up quickly, but I know people with learning disabilities and they can learn the same ideas if given a bit more time. Intelligence, however you define it, is a commodity that is given and received, not something inherent. We think this intelligence is inborn in us, but it is not, and that is why machines gaining all this intelligence scares us. The only thing that is bred into us is our human experience and ability to empathize with other humans. An AI can diagnose my disease by looking at some images, it can tell me about patient outcomes and regurgitate their stories, but it will never live through that disease itself. An AI can tell me a beautiful story of young love, but it will never cry under the bed covers mourning a relationship I thought would last. An AI can tell us about the human experience, but it can never live it itself. We care about the humanity of those around us, it is important to us to know that the people we connect with have lived the same experience as us. This is the comparative advantage we must focus on in the coming age, it's the only aspect of our self worth as a species that we can hold onto as machines replace us in many domains we derived value from. Some might discount this urge for emotional human connection as irrational, an AI can provide the same service or product, maybe even better than a person can. To that I say – my point exactly. Humans are not perfectly rational creatures, our wants are not completely logical. That is what makes us human. A story about perfectly rational people would be mind numbingly boring. Our favorite characters are deeply flawed and relatable. Irrationality is what makes life fun and exciting, and we should treasure the enjoyment we get from our irrationality instead of scorning it as dumb.How we prioritize empathyEconomyOur labor force will shift to a more service based economy than a manufacturing economy. AI’s can build stuff for us. What AI’s cannot do is the irrational sense of comfort and humanity nurses give an ailing patience. Transforming our labor force to focus on services will be disruptive and painful to those who take pride in their craft of producing goods, and we should build robust social services to aid in this transition. But allowing AI to produce and focusing on our comparative advantage of empathy ultimately will improve all our quality of life.ArtWhat is great about art is not always its perfection or aesthetics. It's the sensation that someone has felt the way we feel before. When I read a resonant line of poetry or take in a beautiful painting, I am transported into a feeling I have felt before. I am not just appreciating the craft that went into creating the artifact. The fact that someone else produced it tells me that someone has felt this feeling before. It makes me feel less alone. Someone said that art is like chasing a ghost, you will never catch it but when you put down good writing, you can catch a piece of the dress. AI might present us with a beautiful work of art, but we know that it was never trying to capture any intangible emotion we have felt before.Social statusWe all do it. We probably shouldn’t, but we do. Every society needs some way of valuing its members, and in our capitalistic society we value those who are the smartest and most productive. CEOs of companies and great innovators make lots of money and are granted higher status. While these accomplishments are noteworthy and take lots of hard work, I think we should move away from judging our neighbor on how much money they make or where their kid goes to college. Instead, we should judge our neighbor on their ability to empathize and connect with others. Not just simple acts of kindness, but really connecting and understanding their emotions. This is easier said than done. The definition of sympathy is “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune”, but the definition of empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. It is easy to feel bad for someone because something bad happened to them, none of us want to get sick or get into an accident or just have dumb bad luck. Sympathy is emotionally distancing, what is noteworthy is how they are not like us. What is harder is to look at a person and think about how they are like us, how the same experience has happened to me before in some way. This is a much richer emotion, and connects us to each other through a shared human experience.Relationships with people from different placesWe live in an ever more globalized society. We are building larger scale civilizations than have ever existed on this earth. Nation states are growing in population, with more people uniting under a common identity than ever before. To work together, we need to be able to connect and understand people who may be very different from us. This is where our skill of empathy is going to come in. We need to work together to build economies of scale and massive prosperous industries across borders. We also need it to keep us away from violence. Some may be over zealous at these new nation state identities, and want to establish supremacy. Violence is not the answer, and empathizing with our fellow humans keeps us from tearing each other apart. As the song “the General” by the Dispatch goes – “I have seen the others And I have discovered That this fight is not worth fighting And I've have seen their mothers And I will no other To follow me where I'm going” The song is about a general who gains empathy for the enemy and realizes they are just like him and not worth destroying. We should all internalize the message that our seeming “enemy” are more like us than we think, and violence against them is never the answer.PoliticsDemocrats keep losing elections because they over intellectualize and forget to have empathy with Americans who are suffering. People have lost their jobs, they are experiencing less social mobility than their parents. Yes they need to reskill– it is true those jobs aren’t coming back. But primarily, they are people who feel left behind by the progress society has made, they are struggling to put food on the table. Democrats need to remember that poverty is a real human experience, and not just some social statistic on a spreadsheet. The democratic party cannot continue to cast people from non coastal elite backgrounds as stupid hicks. The value of a person is not their intelligence, it's how they connect with others. Regarding people as worthless because they didn’t go to an expensive New England private school is destructive. We can tolerate this behavior no longer, both for the sake of common decency and the health of our democracy.A note on religion and historyThese ideas of empathy and community are not new. Being kind to others and treating them with love is central to all the major religions. 6 of the 10 commandments are about how to treat other people (the other 4 are about how to honor God). These ideas went out of style in western society as a result of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. While we learn a lot from exploring science and logic, rationality is not who we are as a species. It is time to return our focus to treating other people with love and care.

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