Article by James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas: “For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).
By its nature, intelligence is high-dimensional and relational, not a single quantity that must be unambiguously less or greater than human scale. In fact, it is unclear what we even mean by “human scale,” given that our intelligence is already a collective property, not an individual one. Recent advances in agentic AI show us once again that intelligence has always fundamentally involved the interaction of distinctive, distributed perspectives, and it is from social organization that transformative intelligence has and will continue to emerge.
We can observe this in at least two ways: In the orchestration of societies of AI agents by and with human users in new “centaur” configurations, and in the microsocieties that flourish inside and between reasoning models themselves. Let’s start with the latter…(More)”.
