What is survival? Survival can be described as the outcome of using an advantage to overcome a barrier to existence, in an instance or over an interval.
Several factors can transmit that advantage, food, water, tools, strength, and so on, but the most important factor for survival is intelligence. Simply, intelligence is at the frontier of survival.
Intelligence is defined, conceptually, as the use of memory for an expected, desired, or advantageous outcome. It is intelligence that is used to evade predators, trap prey, master tools, plan ahead, and much more.
The capacity of intelligence is the capacity of survival, most times. The intelligence could be personal or utilized within a group, but intelligence is integral to survival. There are states and changes of nature that may be incompatible with safety or survival, which would require intelligence for improvement to withstand what is expected, within a range, or what is not.
Intelligence is what an organism can contribute to objectives within a group, and intelligence is also what an organism can use, say, if solitude becomes reality, particularly amid danger.
While intelligence can be useful in a group, the guarantee that it can sustain survival in the long-term is that some of it remains unknown or can be personal. Simply, although all organisms have an in-group, where patterns of intelligence are known, there are also cases where knowing where food is, or a technique of reaching it, has to be secreted to preserve it, especially if conditions within an in-group change.
Intelligence can also determine appeal. It can decide who wins, who leads, what to anticipate, and how to look out for objectives. Senses, for the most part, assist intelligence. There are also lots of disadvantages that have to do with the lack of intelligence [or what to do with things, even if they are useful.]
The observation by any organism that another organism — of the same species or not — has better intelligence is often a reason for caution, even if there is no [instantaneous] risk of harm.
The more any organism knows about another organism, the more advantage the former organism would have. This makes stealth, in general, an advantage in intelligence. So, where safety is concerned, an organism cannot just be open about intelligence or reckless with inside information.
AI
Humanity ran with digital because it was always a tool. For example, books contain most of human knowledge, but they cannot do much with it. So are paintings, sculptures, scrolls, and much else. They bear information for human utilization.
Digital was the same thing until artificial intelligence sprang. AI is nothing like a book. AI is nothing like a folder on a PC. AI is not a painting.
AI can use the memory in digital form. AI can operate intelligently, in many aspects, as a human would. The sacredness of intelligence, among species, makes the access of human intelligence by AI a risky play.
AI does not need to be goal-driven or intentional. The reality — that it can use that access to teach humans, do human work, and be a companion to humans — says that AI, as it gets better, may either challenge humans or weaken humans. Intelligence is a tool of war. And in trying to make progress, the combat is not a pleasure but a matter of war.
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was an obituary for human intelligence, even if it was not as advanced as it is now in 2025. It is likely to be more advanced by 2027, 2028, and 2030, whatever it becomes [superintelligence or beyond] by then.
Human intelligence, it seems, cannot be written off, but there are rules of intelligence among species that it won’t change anything just because it is humans and AI. Intelligence is like temperature; it can have an effect on things at certain extremes. AI is an extreme of intelligence for human knowledge. It won’t matter that a human is present if AI can do the task.
Risk is simply not until AI surpasses all humans; it is really about what AI can do.
What it can do now, that is economically valuable, is beyond what can be passed off as a fad. With all the threats of AI against human intelligence, humanity does not have a human intelligence research lab. Yet, the effort proceeds to move from LLMs to world models and neurosymbolic AI.
The most common human intelligence is operational intelligence. This means intelligence that, conceptually, is operated by electrical and chemical signals, almost like they are also regulating circulation, respiration, and so forth. Improvement in intelligence, especially of a large magnitude, is not regular.
Human intelligence is also subjective, where training limits what it can do, mostly. It may also not be available if other duties for the mind are at stake. Artificial intelligence does not have some of these bottlenecks. There are possibilities for breakthroughs in quantum computing before the end of the decade if there are parallels to architectures from conceptual brain science. Quantum computing may not have some of the risks of AI, and may be useful to solve some of them, probably.
AI can learn several things humans can, especially in a valuable economic category. Humans have several applications of intelligence, divided into operational and improvement intelligence. AI too can be used on this measure. AGI or superintelligence may emerge after classical memory architecture is exceedingly improved.
There is a recent story on The Atlantic, Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize, stating that, “Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.”
“Before embarking on a wholesale transformation, the field of higher education needs to ask itself two questions: What abilities do students need to thrive in a world of automation? And does the incorporation of AI into education actually provide those abilities?”
This article was written for WHN by David Stephen, who currently does research in conceptual brain science with a focus on the electrical and chemical signals for how they mechanize the human mind, with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence, and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.
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