{"id":251212,"date":"2025-05-21T23:39:23","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T23:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/apple-2\/from-animals-to-ai-neal-stephenson-on-coexisting-with-non-human-intelligences\/"},"modified":"2025-05-21T23:39:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T23:39:23","slug":"from-animals-to-ai-neal-stephenson-on-coexisting-with-non-human-intelligences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=251212","title":{"rendered":"From Animals to AI: Neal Stephenson on Coexisting with Non-Human Intelligences"},"content":{"rendered":"


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It\u2019s always fascinating to view our current world through the eyes of someone who specializes in fictional realms. Acclaimed science fiction author Neal Stephenson is high on my list of authors to listen to, and not just because he coined the term \u201cmetaverse\u201d in his 1992 novel\u00a0Snow Crash<\/em>. Twenty-five years ago, I shaped much of my thinking about digital privacy based on his keynote at the Computers, Privacy and Freedom 2000 conference (see \u201cThreat Models and Domination Systems<\/a>,\u201d 22 May 2000). Now, in his Graphomane newsletter,\u00a0Stephenson reflects on AI, writing<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren\u2019t human is to consider the fact that we\u2019ve been doing exactly that for long as we\u2019ve existed, because we live among animals. Animals have intelligences of many different kinds. We\u2019re used to thinking of them as being less intelligent than we are, and that\u2019s usually not wrong, but it might be better to think of them as having different sorts of intelligence, because they\u2019ve evolved to do different things.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He goes on to propose three axes on which we could plot these different sorts of intelligences:<\/p>\n