On Intelligence, Intuition, Luck, & Regret

Finding fortune and seeking serendipity

08/01/2024

As this summer has unfurled its days, I have found myself captured in conversation and contemplation, considering life, luck, and the ineffable nature of intuition. The following is four personal essays exploring these topics:

On Intelligence

In 1996, the AI Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, sparking a global conversation about what truly constitutes intelligence.

Now, nearly three decades later, we find ourselves still grappling with the same existential queries – but our artificial counterparts have grown far more sophisticated. I am certainly not a graduate-level researcher who will express a novel perspective on “what AGI means” or “when AGI will be achieved.” But I am very interested in the nature of intelligence.

What separates our carbon-based cognition from the silicon synapses firing in data centers across the globe? How can we as humans measure the unmeasurable – the spark of awareness, or the depth of understanding?

Definitions of intelligence range from simple data processing to economic output, from self-awareness to emotional experiences. As Joshua Tenenbaum suggests, our minds are essentially "collections of general-purpose neural networks with few initial constraints." We're not so different from machines in that respect – we often rely on mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to make decisions.

Take navigation, for example. We think in terms of landmarks and angles, much like how Google Maps calculates the best route. But machines can crunch numbers much faster than we can blink. This begs the question: what kinds of intelligence actually matter for success? One could argue that traits like drive and resourcefulness are equally or more important as computational ability in predicting outcomes.

Alan Turing's famous "imitation game" proposed a simple test: if a machine can convincingly pretend to be human in conversation, it's exhibiting intelligence. But this test doesn't actually prove intelligence, just the ability to simulate it. John Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment drives this point home, illustrating how a computer might pass the Turing test without truly comprehending language. It’s not actually understanding, just simulating it.

But then, how do we know we're also not just "simulating understanding"? Our use of language is similarly just connecting pathways between a database of vocabulary and grammar. The true difference between a GPT tool call to a dictionary API and our neuronal equivalent is unclear.

When it comes to consciousness and sentience, things become even murkier. Turing himself acknowledged that proving machine consciousness is as impossible as proving human consciousness – we can only truly know our own minds. Ask Alexa if she's conscious, and she'll confidently say, "I know who I am." But that's just clever programming, not true self-awareness.

The consciousness versus not-conscious argument ultimately boils down to the same “man of science, man of faith” conflict that powers conversations about religion. Just because you can’t prove something is true doesn’t mean it isn’t, but that also doesn’t mean that you should believe that it is.

There's a bittersweet irony in our quest to recreate our own intelligence. We yearn to birth a new form of consciousness, yet in doing so we may render our own obsolete.

In Kazuo Ishigiro’s “Klara and the Sun’, there is a new race of artificially intelligent humans, “lifted” individuals who are essentially designer babies genetically altered at birth to become gifted students. Narrated from the perspective of an AI robot, the novel explores how intelligence is often captured in the context of adaptibility and experience. How we as humans benefit from thousands of years of evolutionary pre-training preparing us for new tasks. And how the future of artificial intelligence is not limited to synthetic chips and servers.

If trends continue, computers will eventually surpass human intelligence in every way. They're already leagues ahead in mechanical intelligence, crushing us at games like chess and Go. But beating humans at games with defined rules is not representative of true utility. In the "wicked world," as David Epstein describes in Range, "the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be obvious, repetitive patterns, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both."

A friend of mine enjoys discussing the concept of “economic AGI” – that is, artificial general intelligence evaluated by its ability to equal or surpass human capabilities in every-day white-collar economic tasks (such as that of an entry-level analyst or consultant). If the main benchmark we’re measuring for human intelligence is economic output, then we are incredibly close to a world in which this form of AGI has been achieved. But does this truly capture the essence of intelligence?

We often consider well-read knowledgeable people “smart”, but that is the technological equivalent of having a large database backend and a simple retrieval pipeline. A larger database means more knowledge, yes, but not a higher intelligence quotient or level of reasoning ability.

Perhaps we're not so different from the simulacra. Yet there remains that tantalizing hint of something more, a spark of creativity and intuition that has birthed art and music and literature throughout human history.

Will artificial minds one day dream electric sheep, penning poetry about the beauty of a sunset rendered in pixels? Or will consciousness forever elude our silicon children, leaving them as hollow reflections?

Despite performing well on traditional metrics, all existing large language models falter on the ARC-AGI task, which aims to be a better benchmark of human-like general fluid intelligence – measuring skill-acquisition efficiency and highlighting the concepts of scope, generalization difficulty, priors, and experience.

And when considering the concept of a 10X engineer (a person who can produce ten times the output of an average developer), AI is both novice and expert. We consider a person who can do a complex math problem in seconds a genius. Computers are very well equipped for this, but that doesn’t automatically make them such.

It can take AI systems thousands or hundreds of thousands of attempts to successfully accomplish something reliably, and the learning process is therefore far slower than that of a human in pure trial count. But because machines are constrained by energy, not time, they are brilliantly fast.

Does this matter? Or are our conventional ideas about what “intelligence” means bad proxies for machine intelligence?

With the advent of the transformer, AI is often no longer even attempting to mimic human biology. Why do we assume that the artificial brains we are creating have to function the same as human ones, and that we must evaluate them by the same benchmarks?

At the same time, if machines can exceed our capabilities for the tasks we consider measures of human intellect, then perhaps it does not matter how this is being accomplished under the hood. We understand that ultimately, machine learning isn’t magic – it’s math.

As we stand on the precipice of profound change, we must rapidly adjust to a world where human intellect is no longer on top. General intelligence is just the start; superintelligence is next. Given this, will our human intellect be but a spark in time?

One could read this post as simply the synthesis of dozens of conversations this summer in San Francisco. An amalgamation of ideas and questions that don’t ultimately lead to anything – we know we can’t prove many of these ideas, and we have difficulty even defining them, and so we just discuss in circular conversation. But that is also the point.

I have no final answers, only curiosity and a growing sense of wonder. I can't help but marvel at what has been accomplished in the last few years. If scaling laws hold true, new forms of consciousness will continue to emerge and reshape our understanding of what it means to think and to be.

On Intuition

There's a certain magic in those moments when you simply know – a gut feeling, an inexplicable certainty that tugs at the edges of consciousness. I've spent hours chasing these elusive whispers, attempting to bottle that lightning of prescience.

I think about building the right things at the right moments, months before they exploded into the zeitgeist. What was that intuition — excitement, a hunch, or something more?

How can you nourish that inner voice, learn to trust those nudges that guide you toward unseen opportunities? When accurate, intutition can obviously be a force of immense power - but how can we discern true insight from wishful thinking? The signal from the noise?

The decisions that brought me to prescient projects were rarely intentional, certainly not born of meticulous career planning. So what unseen current carried me? And how might a person recognize its pull again?

At Prod, people speak of the "time traveler's mindset" – living with one foot in a potential future, eyes fixed on a horizon only you can see. The best builders embody this ethos, driven by a vision they aim to make manifest. To do this, they need both extreme conviction and the ability to suspend disbelief.

One of my favorite book series, The Stormlight Archive, finishes each mega-long novel with an epilogue musing on some aspect of humanity. The first is called Of Most Worth, and grapples with what humans find most valuable.

A character philosophizes, considering intellect, aesthetic achievement, and innovation. That we most esteem our brilliant researchers, artists, and inventors.

These ideas are discarded. In the end, they conclude, humans value novelty. We are drawn to the unprecedented, reserving our greatest esteem for those who go for it first – that initial brushstroke on a blank canvas, the debut performance of a world-changing invention.

Does that mean it's all a mirage; is intuition simply great timing? Jobs popularized the idea of connecting dots in retrospect, but I wonder if true visionaries glimpse those connections before they fully form, tracing ghostly outlines of a future unborn.

I think of brilliant friends, the passion projects that light up their eyes. Their enthusiasm is contagious, hinting at possibilities.

Intuition, I've come to realize, is ultimately a combination of confidence and excitement. It can be hard to do something when nobody else thinks it's worthwhile. You have to be fine with closing your eyes and listening to what excites you. If you make decisions based on what you're excited about (and you're positive its not others' excitement that you're confusing for your own), you're likely on the right track.

Saying “trust your gut” like that typically isn’t helpful, but ultimately, following intuition requires trust in yourself, even and especially when you cannot see the whole path.

Are you certain that regardless of what other people think, what you’re doing is the right thing to be spending your time on? That you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else, and you don’t understand why most other people don’t see what you see? That what excites you “feels right”?

Then it probably is.

On Luck

I’ve always loved dreaming up ideas for stories.

One premise I recall vividly was a world in which everyone is born with a limited amount of luck. People could then either “save” that fortune and live to be a hundred years old by spending it conservatively, or use it all up in their youth, flaming out in a fiery blaze of glory.

This, of course, is not how luck works. It's not something you can hoard, and it isn't finite.

The world is a fundamentally chaotic place, governed by coincidence and chance. I've seen how small, seemingly insignificant decisions can have profound consequences. And at every interval on this spectrum, the range of outcomes can vary wildly.

Still, I have always considered myself incredibly lucky. In the last year alone, journaling a couple times a week, I wrote thirty-two entries that mentioned how “lucky” I felt about something. I've been fortunate in my friendships, blessed with strong family relationships, and positioned to take risks with my time.

But I still journal frequently about choices I have yet to make. What the right decision is. After all, there are some decisions that will very obviously impact your life. If or where to attend college. If you leave. Where you choose to live afterwards. Your life partner. Your career.

While you can prepare for and deeply consider these choices, there are so many other things that affect these decisions that are very chance-dependent. Your location and background, the genetic lottery you enter the world with. The universe does grant people a form of luck at birth, just not the same amount.

And then in life, some people are lucky and some people are unlucky, apparently arbitrarily. A significant amount of the time, your life is out of your control and small decisions you’ll never acknowledge will have a massive impact on you.

A butterfly's wings flap in Brazil, and a tornado forms in Texas. You could meet the love of your life tomorrow. Or you or someone you care about could die. These things do not happen for a reason.

You can only control for yourself. So how can you optimize for serendipity?

Seneca once said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." In practice, this means increasing our "surface area" and accelerating our efforts.

A certain Sam has talked about how luck “increases super-linearly with more surface area – meeting more people, making more connections between new ideas, learning new patterns.” My friend Tina Mai also wrote an incredible piece about exactly this – how being found is about being findable. How getting lucky is about putting yourself in a position to get lucky.

This means being prepared when opportunity knocks. Think college admissions - there's no perfect application that guarantees entry into an Ivy League university. Every single student who attends Harvard or Yale is lucky their application was chosen from a sea of similarly-qualified applicants. But they also had to meet certain thresholds, achieve impressive extracurriculars, and tell a compelling personal story.

Send the right email, attend the right dinner, sit in the right seat. Building and maintaining a diverse network increases the chances of serendipitous connections and opportunities. Every new connection forged, every skill honed, every idea explored - these are the seeds we scatter, without knowing which might take root and blossom into something extraordinary.

The digital age has completely reshaped how luck can manifest, amplifying serendipity in ways our ancestors could scarcely dream of. Anything you put online can spread virally, for better and worse. The internet has massively increased, commoditized, and in many ways leveled the surface area for luck (at least in tech).

And this also plays into the second aspect, acceleration.

Effort, and the luck that it can evoke, compounds. One door opens two more opens two more opens two more. The butterfly effect is very real – and directable. It is a stack of dominoes toppling over, falling faster and faster. Becoming the best at what you do is a way to stand out, and as you push further in any particular direction, you increase the chances that "fortune will find you."

Figuring out the direction you seek to move in is easier said than done. But as Naval says, if you refine what you do until this is true, opportunity will seek you out.

Luck isn't just chaos. It can become destiny.

On Regret

If you could open an envelope and see the date you'll leave this world, would you?

What if it was tomorrow? What would you do? Would you have regrets?

In Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man," there's a short story "The Last Night in the World." A couple learns the world is going to end at midnight, and yet they carry on with their routine - washing dishes, tucking children into bed, listening to the radio. Upon first read, I saw it as a metaphor for how people can fail to seize the moment, even when faced with finality.

But you can't live every day as if it's your last and still plan for the future. The essence of YOLO, in my view, isn't recklessness, but making the most of each moment, being present, and living with intentionality. Living with purpose.

In that vein, and upon re-read, I interpret the couple in The Illustrated Man as living without regrets. They were always doing exactly what they wanted to be doing.

Many decisions carry significant opportunity costs, some so vast we can scarcely imagine them. I think of my experience in college, and attempt to conceive the alternate universes that might have unfolded had I gone somewhere else. Entire worlds of relationships and growth, forever unexplored.

There is an endless abyss of "what ifs" that extend from every moment in time, and so even the concept of a regret is simply just focusing in on one of those dots, or a few of them.

This is why I'm skeptical of regret minimization as a decision-making framework. While it has merits, it often requires us to make judgments about so much we cannot know. Opportunity cost is important to consider, but our predictions about the future often fail to capture the full scope of the alternative.

Life is filled with decisions, each a juggling act of expected value and costs. Some balls, like your education or career, are made of rubber. Drop them, and they bounce back. Others, like your relationships or health, are made of fragile glass. Drop them and they shatter, and are much more difficult to reassemble. We can't keep all the balls in the air at once, and to throw one high often means letting another fall.

I like this metaphor because it reflects the reality that we must decide what life we want to live and what sacrifices we're willing to make to get there. That there are no universally correct choices, only reflections of our personal values.

This summer, like past summers, was a summer of reflection and decision-making. Some choices required deep contemplation, and a realization that often in life, no matter what path we choose, we may wonder about the road not traveled.

You can make objectively wrong or bad decisions, in hindsight. But it's possible to live with minimal regrets by understanding your reasoning at the time of a decision. And after making a choice, you have to live with it.

So, it's important to make decisions with intention. One of my parents has a parable about this: a king and queen are fighting about where to hang a painting in a castle, and the king finally says "hang it wherever you want" to be done with it. But then every time he walks past the painting, he gets upset, and that's entirely on him. Make sure you're happy with the choice you've made when you make it.

Along those lines, some consider decisiveness the hallmark of success. But true success often lies in discerning which decisions truly matter, and then making the unimportant ones swiftly and giving the crucial ones the contemplation they deserve.

My mom has a long-running book club – and since we share the same Kindle library, I occasionally read them. One such novel was "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig.

In the book, a woman in limbo with many regrets explores infinite variations of her life through a metaphysical library. Ultimately, she discovers that no alternative was inherently better or worse, just different.

It's a powerful reminder not to dwell on regret – the past is immutable, set in stone. What matters is the present. As Sanderson writes, "the most important step a man can take? It's not the first one or the last one, but the next one. Always the next step."

There’s an inverse to regret minimization – a more positive framework through which to view the world. It’s happiness maximization.

When making decisions, consider what path might bring you the most joy, and excites and inspires you. And choose that one.

If you do that every time, even if it later turns out to have been the "wrong" decision, you shouldn’t regret it.

Because in the end, it's not about making perfect choices, but about embracing life, and finding contentment in the journey itself.