IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 82

Feature
The Intelligence Factor:
Technology and the
Missing Link
Jeff Robbins
Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, NJ 8901-8554, USA
...By design, machines are our obedient and able
slaves. But intelligent machines, however benevolent,
could threaten our existence because they
will be alternative inhabitants of our ecological
niche. Even machines merely AS clever as human
beings will have enormous advantages in certain
competitive situations. They cost less to build and
maintain, so more of them can be put to work
with given resources. They can be optimized to
do their jobs and programmed to work tirelessly
[1, pp. 136, 138].
 In hIs new book, Future Minds: The Rise of Intelligence
From the Big Bang to the End of the Universe,
author, speaker, and futurist, Richard Yonck, covers
a lot of ground under the umbrella of emerging intelligence
in the universe, including the 21st century
artificial intelligence (AI), its promise, and threat.
After citing a number of diverse definitions of
intelligence, Yonck settles on a definition by physicist,
mathematician, and entrepreneur, Alexander
Wissner-Gross, as:
Intelligence acts as to maximize future freedom of
action [2, p. 18].
Yonck takes this definition and runs with it. If one
sweeps across the entire span of evolving life, what
bubbles up is just what Wissner-Gross claims. In the
realm of life, freedom of action enables access to
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3147528
Date of current version: 9 March 2022.
82
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
more possibilities for future action for those species
that smartly avoid getting trapped in evolutionary
dead ends. As Wissner-Gross puts it in his TEDxBeaconStreet
presentation, " A new equation for intelligence, "
" [I]ntelligence doesn't like to get trapped "
[3]-[5]. One sees this in the game of chess in which
the winner has avoided the dead end of checkmate.
In chess, control of the center of the board is a tactical
goal because it allows greater mobility of pieces
and access to positions on the board, maximizing
future freedom of action, in this case game-winning
chess moves. The evolution of upright walking freed
the hands for far more sophisticated manipulation. In
his article, " The real reasons we walk on two legs and
not four, " BBC journalist, Richard Gray, writes that " It
is widely recognized that permanently standing up
opened up new opportunities for our ancestors to
touch, explore, pick up, throw, and learn. " According
to Chris Stringer, a leading anthropologist at the Natural
History Museum, London, " Walking upright freed
the hands for carrying and manipulating tools...It
allows longer-distance walking and, eventually, endurance
running. Ultimately, it may have been a key step
that led our ancestors' brains to grow " [6]. Walking on
two legs, upright stature, and freeing the hands for tool
use coupled to social cooperation greatly multiplied
the power of multiple hands and brains.
Freedom of action represents free energy or
" exergy, " the localized shrinking of entropy, the measure
of dissipated-order, spread-out useless energy.
Maximizing freedom of action implies the competitive
advantage of intelligence that successfully
achieves goals. It also represents purposeful connecting
of previously disconnected matter and energy, the
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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