"Bear with me for a minute, and let's consider a counter-narrative. For years and maybe even decades, the future of artificial intelligence (AI) has been framed as a countdown to an inevitable result. At some point, we are told, machines will cross a threshold and become "general" and capable of understanding across domains the way humans do. The moment is often imagined as a kind of cognitive sunrise or epiphany."
"This counter-narrative deserves a closer look. What if that moment never arrives? What if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is not delayed, but conceptually misframed? And, perhaps most curious to me, what if "general intelligence" is not a thing that can exist apart from a living and autobiographical mind?"
"What we call "general intelligence" may already be something of a narrative illusion. It's not a single, all-purpose cognitive engine but a coherence we impose on a cluster of specialized systems, each with its own logic and constraints. In that sense, the human brain itself is modular. What makes this modular system feel "general" isn't the architecture alone but the presence of a self that binds these capacities into one lived story. They belong to the same "someone." The unity of intelligence, in humans, is not computational. It is autobiographical."
The future of AI is often framed as an inevitable move toward a single, general intelligence. That framing may be conceptually flawed: general intelligence could be a narrative illusion rather than a standalone, transferable faculty. Human cognition is modular, composed of perception, emotion, memory, language, social inference, and moral intuition operating with distinct logics. A persistent autobiographical self binds these capacities into a unified lived story, creating the appearance of a single, general intelligence. Machines can emulate understanding without an inner point of view; the true risk is relying on intelligence that lacks a mind.
Read at Psychology Today
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