It began harmlessly enough, with the question of what intelligence actually is.
The short answer would have been: the ability to make the right thing from little information.
The honest answer is more complicated: intelligence recognises patterns, builds models, makes decisions and still fails spectacularly with impressive regularity.
The great mistake is to think intelligence can be added. Two people with an IQ of 80 do not produce one with 160. Otherwise meetings would be the high temples of humanity.
Einstein was not a genius because enough average people were assembled, but because he thought differently, not because there was more of him.
A single ant is committed but limited. An ant colony organises food, defence and construction without central management. Humanity long believed it was equally clever. Then the internet arrived and we discovered that we too are a swarm, only louder.
In one experiment, a slightly disturbed minnow swam strangely through the water. The school copied it. A human reads this and thinks: how stupid. Then he opens social media.
Evolution is not a beautiful process. It is more like: we try something, and if it does not go completely wrong, we keep it. Sometimes it goes completely wrong.
An extreme example is Pol Pot: abolish intelligence, create a peasant state. The result was collapse and unimaginable suffering. That too is evolution, not in the sense of good, but in the sense of happening and failing.
Humans love fine names: democracy, communism, freedom, justice. The problem is that the names stay the same while their contents change.
Athenian democracy excluded women and slaves and relied on direct voting. Today it would look like an exclusive men’s club.
Modern democracy promises voting, deciding and participating. In practice it often means campaign promises, government compromises and surprise at the result. Politics rarely abolishes anything; it rebuilds it and sells it again.
China shows efficiency meeting control: fast decisions, large projects and strong direction. Less chaos, more control; less discussion, more implementation.
Perhaps one day artificial intelligence will solve conflicts and make people wiser. In reality AI can optimise, but it cannot decide what good means.
Morality also looks fixed, yet it changes constantly. Yesterday hierarchy, today diversity. Morality is not a fixed measure but a product of experience, power, culture and time. It is not the solution; it is part of the experiment.
The real conflict is simple: intelligence wants to move forward, systems want to remain stable, and morality changes the rules. The result is a permanent experiment with mixed outcomes.
The most honest sentence may be this: humanity is an intelligent swarm constantly trying to understand itself, while occasionally doing things that would make even a minnow suspicious.
