Benjamin Studebaker Talks Intelligence And The Natural Slave

Yeah, I think the intelligence, it's this word we use it all the time.

We take it for granted.

And I think it's largely safe to take it for granted.

I think we look a bit mad when we say, well, what even is intelligence? It's like, you know, the air.

It's like if I were going around saying, well, I don't know about this air thing.

I don't know about respiration, guys.

Yeah.

But it is also true that we identify one thing that we do and then we project that or map it on to a totalized image of... what it is to be a human or whatever.

And then we, we miss out on things that aren't included in this type of functional or instrumental, uh, or goal oriented activity.

The, the most widely agreed upon definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve a goal in an environment or in a world.

Uh, then there's different kind of variations and modulations of that.

Another really widely accepted definition is, um, uh, efficacy at playing games or effectiveness at game playing.

Um, but it's, it's not like if you go to neuro, uh, neuropsychology, if you go to cognitive psychology, if you go to biologists, like they all have different versions of how to define intelligence and why it's important.

Um, but it seems to be the case that, that we're just carried away with this functional, um, effective instrumental definition of intelligence uh and then we have people out here proclaiming we have achieved artificial general intelligence we we are replacing workers with llms and and we are replacing workers with llms we're replacing a huge section of variable capital with this type of kind of constant capital this objectified intellectual labor um But whatever it is, the surplus that isn't included in this definition of intelligence is becoming less and less relevant, less and less politically important.

It feels like to me as a doomer, it seems to be the case that we are optimizing the Whatever it is, that's not included in this functional definition of intelligence.

Away.

And yeah, this question of the natural slave, are we currently naturalizing and universalizing this type of slavery?

Feels like it.

Yeah.

So I

think this is a really interesting point.

And I think that this is something also that's been going on for a long time.

And so far as what Aristotle counts as appropriate free activity for man is something that we have made less and less space for in modernity.

I think really dating back to at least Hobbes.

Aristotle makes the argument that a man can choose his own ends and then he can go into an assembly and have a deliberation with other people and that they can arrive together at a decision about what they want to do on the basis of common ends, which they deliberate about how to operationalize together.