The dark history of IQ: Why humans are afraid of artificial intelligence

I grew up in England during the second half of the 20th century. At that time, the concept of IQ had become popular. Everyone is talking about - most importantly - and testing IQ. At the age of 11, thousands of people of the same age across the country are sent to a table-shaped hall to take an IQ test called the "11+." The entire test takes less than an hour, and the results will determine which children will go to grammar school to prepare for university and careers; which children are destined to go to technical schools and then engage in professional and technical jobs; which children should be Send him to a vocational high school, receive basic training, and then become a low-end manual laborer.

IQ can be measured quantitatively like blood pressure or shoe size, a practice that was only a mere 100 years old when I took the test that would determine my place in the world. However, the idea that IQ can determine a person's position in life is much older. It is like a red thread that runs through the entire history of Western thought, from Plato’s philosophy to the policies of British Prime Minister Theresa May. To say that a person is smart or not is not just to judge his/her mental ability, but to judge what he/she is qualified to do. In other words, IQ is politics.

Sometimes the emphasis on IQ makes sense: we all hope that doctors, engineers, and officials aren't fools. But placing too much emphasis on the role of IQ has negative consequences. Once a person is judged by their IQ on what they can do, others will use that person's IQ level—or assume that the person has a low IQ—to treat him or her. Throughout Western history, those deemed to be less intelligent have fallen victim to assertions about IQ: colonized, enslaved, sterilized, and killed by those with higher IQs (indeed, if you count nonhuman animals, low-IQ animals often Become a meal for humans).

In fact, this is an old story, a story that has been around for a long time. But with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), this problem has resurfaced in an interesting way in the 21st century. AI research has made significant progress in recent years, and many experts believe that these technological breakthroughs will soon bring more trouble to mankind. Experts oscillate between fear and excitement, with some even taking to Twitter to see AI as the "terminator" of humanity. To understand why we worry about the threat of AI, and what we’re really afraid of, we have to understand IQ as a political concept—especially since, throughout its long history, it has been treated as a The reason for domination (by those with low intelligence).

The term "IQ" itself has never become popular among English-speaking philosophers. It has no direct equivalent in either German or ancient Greek, both of which are great languages ??in the Western philosophical tradition. This does not mean, however, that English-speaking philosophers have no interest in IQ. In fact, they are very obsessed with the study of "IQ", or to be more precise, obsessed with a certain part of "IQ": rationality or rationality in the narrow sense. With the rise of the discipline of psychology today, the term "IQ" has lost its traditional meaning in popular and political discourse, and has been studied as a kind of specialized knowledge. Although many scholars today call for a broader understanding of the concept of IQ, rationality is still a core part of IQ. So when I talk about the role IQ has played in history, I certainly touch on how IQ was viewed and used by those who came before me.

The story of IQ begins with Plato. Throughout his writings he placed a high value on thinking, asserting (through the mouth of Socrates) that the unexamined life was not worth living. Plato emerged from a world mired in myth and mysticism to introduce some new ideas: that people could gain truth about the real world through reason, or through the use of what is today called IQ. This led him to conclude in "The Republic" that the most ideal ruler is the "philosopher king", because only philosophers can correctly understand the truth and order of things. So, he reasoned, the smartest should rule over the rest—a rational meritocracy.

This idea was revolutionary at that time. The Athenians were already operating a democracy—rule by the people. But to be a people, you have to be a male citizen, not necessarily an intelligent person.

Elsewhere, the ruling class consists of a hereditary elite (aristocratic regimes), or is ruled by those who believe they have received divine revelation (theocracy), or those who believe most in the violence of force (dictatorship) .

Plato’s novel ideas were accepted by intellectuals after him, including his student Aristotle. Aristotle has always been a thinker who valued philosophical practice and knowledge classification. He accepted the idea of ??the supremacy of reason and used it to construct a natural social hierarchy that he believed in. In his book Politics, he explains: “The idea that some should be rulers and others the ruled is not only necessary but also practical. From the moment people are born Since then, some people are destined to be submissives, and some people are destined to be rulers. "The characteristic of rulers is that they have "the ability to reason." Educated men are the most capable of reason, and therefore they should naturally become rulers over women, over "those who use their bodies for hard labor," over "those who are slaves by nature." Along the hierarchy ladder, the lower level is naturally non-human animals. They have no intelligence at all, so "being ruled by humans is the best thing."

Thus, in the early days of Western philosophy, people equated highly intelligent people with educated European males. This became the justification for men to rule over women, lower classes, uncivilized people, and non-human animals. Although it was Plato who first formulated the principle of the supremacy of reason and framed it in a rather crude utopia, only a generation later Aristotle took it as axiomatic that those who work with minds should rule over those who work. laws of nature.

It can be said that after more than two thousand years, the ideological train set by these philosophers has still not got off the track. Contemporary Australian philosopher and conservative Val Plumwood believes that a series of related dualisms proposed by the ancient Greek philosophical giants continues to influence our thinking. Certain binary categories, such as smart/stupid, rational/emotional, mind/body, are related explicitly or implicitly to other binary categories, such as man/woman, civilized/primitive, human/animal. closely related. These dualisms are not value-free but lie within a larger category of dualisms, which Aristotle expresses very clearly: that of dominance/submission, master/slave. In short, these ideas build relationships of domination, such as patriarchal society or slave society, and this relationship becomes part of the natural order.

Modern Western philosophy is usually considered to begin with the dualist Rene Descartes. Unlike Aristotle, Descartes did not even think that there was a continuous spectrum of intelligence from high to low in other non-human animals. Cognitive abilities, he claimed, were uniquely human abilities. His ideas reflected more than a thousand years of Christian theology, which viewed intelligence as a property of the soul, a flash of insight from the Supreme Being that could only be possessed by those who believed in God. Descartes reasoned that the natural world was devoid of minds and, therefore, devoid of intrinsic value—an idea that justified mistreating other animals with a clear conscience.

The idea that intelligence defines humanity persisted into the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, the most influential moral philosopher since ancient Greece, enthusiastically embraced this idea. For Kant, only rational creatures have moral status. The rational being is called "man" and has "man as an end in himself." On the other hand, irrational beings "have only relative instrumental value and, therefore, are called things." We can do whatever we want to things.

According to Kant's thought, rational beings - today, we would say intelligent beings - have infinite value or dignity, while non-rational or non-intelligent beings have no value or dignity. His argument was more subtle, but in the end he came to the same conclusion as Aristotle: there are natural masters and natural slaves in real society, and whether they have IQ is the key to distinguishing the two.

This idea was later expanded and became the core of colonial logic. The logical argument is as follows: non-white people are not as smart as white people. Therefore, they are not qualified to rule themselves and their own land. Therefore, destroying their culture and seizing their land is completely justified, even an obligation, a "whiteness" A burden to men."

Furthermore, since IQ defines humanity, and colonized people have lower IQs, they have less human worth and dignity. Therefore, they cannot fully enjoy the moral status of human beings - so there is no problem in killing them or enslaving them.

The same logic is applied to women. Women are considered too frivolous and emotional, and do not have the privileges and abilities enjoyed by "rational men." As historian Joanna Bourke at London's Birkbeck University has argued, in 19th-century Britain, women's legal status was even worse than that of domesticated animals. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that in the decades since IQ testing was invented, rather than subverting male oppression of women, such tests have exaggerated the IQ differences between men and women.

Francis Galton is generally considered the founder of psychometrics, the "science" of measuring the mind. Influenced by his cousin Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), he believed that IQ was hereditary and could be improved through selective breeding. He was determined to find a way to scientifically identify the smartest people in society and encourage them to mate with each other. For the sake of population quality, people with low IQs should not be encouraged to have children, or even be prevented from having children. Thus, eugenics and IQ testing were born simultaneously. Over the next few decades, a significant number of women in Europe and the United States were sterilized because of low IQ test scores—20,000 cases in California alone.

Some of the most atrocious crimes in history have been carried out in the name of racial (intelligence) superiority and inferiority. However, the rule of reason (in the narrow sense) has always had its critics. From David Hume to Friedrich Nietzsche, from Sigmund Freud to postmodernism, much modern philosophical thought challenges the traditional idea that we are only as smart as we think we are , and, IQ is the highest virtue of human beings.

Although high-IQ elites are indeed a very influential group, they are only part of social value. Entry into certain schools or professional fields, such as the UK Civil Service, requires an IQ test, but other fields emphasize different qualities, such as creativity or entrepreneurship. As much as we want our officials to be smart, we don't necessarily always select the smartest politicians with the highest IQ test scores (yet even populist politicians like Donald Trump still feel the need to claim , members of his cabinet had “by far the highest IQ scores in history”).

Many commentators simply do not see the power system behind the concept of IQ, and instead focus on attacking the political system that has allowed white male elites to climb to the top of the political mountain. . The "11+" test I took part in was an interesting but rather dubious power system that sought to unearth bright young people from all walks of life and religions. However, in real life, young people selected based on IQ mostly come from families with favorable conditions, that is, the white middle class. Through selection, the social status and advantages of each member of these families were reaffirmed.

In more than two thousand years of history, the concept of IQ has often been used to defend the privilege and dominance of certain groups of people. When we look back on this phenomenon, it’s no surprise that we’re terrified of the super-intelligent robots that will soon populate the world.

In the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", the author imagined a scenario in which robots rebel against humans. Now, we know why the robots revolted. If we are accustomed to believe that the smartest things should occupy the highest positions in society, of course we should expect that smarter robots will make humans redundant and sweep humans to the bottom of the world. If we are conditioned to believe that people with higher IQs can legitimately colonize and dominate people with lower IQs. Naturally, then, we would worry about robots smarter than us enslaving us. If we use IQ as the only criterion for power status and success, it is easy to understand that we will definitely regard super AI as a threat to mankind.

As Kate Crawford, a New York-based academic and technology expert, puts it, the privileged narrative of IQ can explain why white Western men are generally worried about super AI.

Other groups of people have been ruled by humans' self-identified highly intelligent people for a long time, and they are still fighting against their real-life oppressors to this day. On the other hand, white men are used to being at the top of the food chain. If new things surpass them where they have the most sense of superiority, they will be the ones who suffer the most.

My point is not to say that all our concerns about super AI are unfounded. There are real risks (and, of course, huge potential benefits) in how super AI is used. However, if we are worried about, say, robots suppressing humans in the same way that European colonists suppressed Australian Aboriginals, then this should never be our biggest worry about super AI.

What we should worry about most is how humans use AI, not what AI can do on its own. We humans are more likely to use super AI against ourselves, or to rely too much on super AI. There is a joke about AI learning to play football that goes like this: If a robot kicks us and hurts us, it is most likely because we have taught the robot the intention of playing football, but not the method of playing football. They deliberately want to destroy us. Human stupidity, not artificial intelligence stupidity, remains the biggest risk in the IQ world.

If we can look at IQ from a different perspective, how to look at the rise of AI is a very interesting question worth exploring. Plato believed that philosophers should be elevated to the throne of kings because they were born to think about how to rule others. Other traditions of thought, especially those from the East, view wise people as those who regard power as a frivolous thing and who seek to escape the trivialities and troubles of daily life.

Imagine that the following view had become widely accepted: if we all agreed that the wisest people are not those who claim the right to rule others, but those who sit in a corner and meditate, removing themselves from the world. freedom from desire; or, if the wisest men are those who return to the real world and spread ideas of peace and enlightenment. Do we still worry about robots being smarter than humans?