Why We Haven’t Reached Superintelligence, with David Krakauer

In a special edition of StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, joined by Gary O'Reilly and Chuck Nice, delves into the profound question of intelligence itself, moving beyond the buzz of artificial intelligence to understand its fundamental nature across all life forms. Their guest, evolutionary biologist David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, offers a fascinating perspective on how intelligence evolved and what it truly means.

Defining Intelligence: Making Hard Problems Easy

David Krakauer defines intelligence as the ability to make hard problems easy. This isn't exclusive to humans; it's a universal principle observed across animal species, and even plants. From a microbe finding an efficient way to solve a problem to complex organisms evolving brains, the core idea is to find optimal solutions rather than inefficient ones. This definition immediately sets the stage for a critical comparison with AI, which, as Krakauer points out, often relies on inefficient solutions, albeit at scale.

Life and intelligence are deeply intertwined. Krakauer suggests that as soon as life emerges, some form of intelligence is present. Any organized matter that can sense its environment and act in a way that increases its representation in the world—through replication or survival—possesses intelligence. This leads to an interesting theoretical problem: life feels binary (you're either alive or not), while intelligence is continuous. The challenge lies in understanding how a binary system gives rise to a continuous one, and what forces drive the evolution of higher levels of intelligence.