Better Is a Useless Dimension
You say: we’re creating AI that can do everything better than humans.
But what does it mean to do something better? Does it mean winning? Does it mean doing it faster?
Imagine a child standing in the kitchen. The father is a professional chef. Who should cook?
If the father does it, everything goes perfectly.
If the child does it, everything goes wrong: the kitchen catches fire, the food burns, it doesn’t taste good.
Theoretically, the father should always be the one to cook.
And yet, that’s not how it works. Because then no one learns. The “less skilled” one has to do it — because both parties learn from that. And that way, everyone improves.
Solar System in Their Heads
The difference in intelligence between poor people and rich people is 99 percent confidence.
Both have a neurological solar system in their heads that’s so complicated, nobody understands how it works.
Let’s say you are into physics. Your whole life is physics. Fantastic.
Or your whole life is religion. Everything you do, your whole worldview—everything—is religious.
The problem for both is this: it’s way harder than you think to look at something with a fresh pair of eyes. When your worldview is based on a certain way of thinking, you can’t ‘outthink’ that. And then you get stuck.
This also applies to confidence. When your confidence is low, every step you take during the day—and I mean every step—is filled with doubt. Maybe you get some moments of relief, but you can’t escape that worldview. So you have to fix that. Otherwise, it haunts you all the time.
The reverse is also true. When your confidence is high, it doesn’t really matter what you do. You mess up a workout? You just blame it on something else.
The difference between how people behave—with low confidence versus high confidence—is astonishing. They go practically through the same things, but with a completely different response.
I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve also been on both sides of the fence with science and religion. In all these scenarios, we’re looking at the same world, the same things, but with a 100 percent different response. And it’s not that someone is truly right or wrong. You are more right or wrong from your own perspective.
From a religious perspective, you could argue that science has no clue what it’s doing, since every major theory changes every few hundred years. And is the scientific progress we make really progress? Are we happier? Was a computer built because of physics, or because someone was experimenting in an attic?
Conversely, you could say that religion is just plain wrong. A lot of major claims have been debunked. Some parts are medieval.
Therefore, intelligence is conditional.
Kids who don’t have confidence will, in a way, also not be intelligent.
And that’s the sad part.
So a foundation—where you start—is infinitely more important than what you know, or what your score on an IQ test is.