Trouble in Intelligence

The emerging AI seems to me to reveal our age-old fear of otherness. But what if this encounter offered us the opportunity to rethink our relationship to all forms of intelligence that surround us?

The illusion of human superiority

A large part of the debates around artificial intelligence, whether for or against, is actually based on a profoundly anthropocentric conception of the world and of the relationship between human beings and their environment, whether natural, animal, or machine-based. Sociologist Franck Cochoy explains this with great talent in his article “For the antiluddism of the warm welcome of AI among humans” (AOC, June 2025). He poses a question there that I consider essential, which I share: “What if the time had come to stop speaking with an entirely anthropocentric condescension about artificial intelligence, as if it were a second-rate fake intelligence, unworthy of the natural intelligence of human beings?” His proposal to replace the term “artificial intelligence” with “machine intelligence” seems enlightening to me: it invites us to stop postulating that human intelligence would be the absolute reference point, the universal standard from which any other form of intelligence should be measured and judged.

For after all, what about the intelligence of nature, this millennial wisdom of ecosystems that self-regulate without our intervention? What about animal intelligence, whose cognitive and emotional capacities never cease to surprise us? What about plant intelligence, which communicates through mycorrhizal networks of dizzying complexity? As Spinoza already said in his Ethics (1677), “Men believe themselves free, for the reason that they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and the causes that dispose them to appetite and will, they ignore, and don’t even think about in dreams.” Our anthropocentrism is nothing but a narcissistic illusion that prevents us from perceiving the cognitive richness of the world around us.

Even worse, this anthropocentrism has historically justified the worst hierarchical discriminations. Franck Cochoy identifies “three types of anthropocentric depreciation of others’ intelligence”: racism and sexism among human beings, speciesism toward animals, and now what he calls “e-luddism” toward machines. Racism postulates that certain ethnicities would have inferior intelligence, to justify their domination. Sexism invents differentiated intelligences between biological sexes to legitimize oppression. And speciesism, a concept developed by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975), postulates a cognitive inferiority of animals to justify their ignoble exploitation. It’s always the same perverse mechanism: denigrating the intelligence of the other to validate the superiority of our own and our dominating approaches. But who are we to judge, we who only consider the situation from our anthropocentric prism, and mainly Western at that?

The cooperation of multiple intelligences

In this fantasy of domination that has driven us for millennia, we miss the immense potential of cooperation between different forms of intelligence. The example of permaculture is enlightening in this regard: by restoring the diversity of plant species and respecting natural interactions, it works toward an evolution of the living environment infinitely more beneficial for the fauna and flora that occupy it. Bill Mollison, who originated this movement in the 1970s, never stopped repeating: “The problem is the solution.” This means that in permaculture (and more broadly in any living system or project), an obstacle or difficulty is not just a hindrance to circumvent: we must change perspective and see in it a potential or an opportunity for innovation. Instead of fighting the “problem,” the approach consists of observing, understanding, and integrating this element so that it actively participates in the balance and sustainability of the system. For example, a “weed” can enrich the soil or be useful for compost, stagnant water can become a pond beneficial to biodiversity, etc. This principle invites us to transform each setback into a resource, to “work with nature rather than against it” and to adopt a systemic and creative view of interactions in an environment.

Thus, it is by welcoming other intelligences, by ceasing to postulate our superiority to establish our domination, by envisioning complementarities rather than hierarchies, that we might perhaps, little by little, refound our dignity as human beings in the regime of the living, we who have so damaged it.

We must acknowledge that we are the most destructive animal species. Franck Cochoy highlights this with irony, as Yuval Noah Harari already did in Sapiens (2016): “If we had to hierarchize species by the measure of intelligence, we could rightfully wonder if the human species wouldn’t deserve to be placed at the very bottom of the scale, as it is by far the most invasive and harmful species, incapable of curbing its deadly action, despite its supposedly ’intelligent’ character.” We have caused what the scientific community now calls the sixth mass extinction. Our record is catastrophic.

Despite what we want to believe, within nature, we are probably the least gifted with intelligence in the systemic sense of the term. Animals and plants have incredible capacities for perception, intelligence, and collective construction, which we discover day by day (read, among others: Frans de Waal, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Temple Grandin, Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Francis Martin, Fleur Daugey, Claude Joseph, Quentin Hiernaux, Marc Williams Debono, Florence Burgat...) Thus, the fact that we have been able to create “intelligent” machines should push us toward humility rather than the illusion of mastery. The divine metaphor that some apply to artificial intelligence doesn’t concern us: it concerns the machines we have created, and which already surpass us on many levels.

Rethinking trust and otherness

We should stop comparing ourselves and start truly cooperating with our environment, whether natural or artificial. Franck Cochoy humorously raises a question that could also make one smile, so accurate it is: we wonder if we can trust an artificial intelligence. But can we trust another human being? Trust has nothing to do with intelligence. Human beings can sometimes behave like the worst of machines, devoid of any true intelligence, locked in their normative stupidity, enjoying their little power over others. Nothing guarantees us the benevolence of other human beings.

Franck Cochoy thus amuses himself with our comparative obsession, this anxious search for what we would have “more” than machines. He reveals that this strategy is “purely defensive, eminently fragile and provisional: it finds itself a little more refuted by facts each day.” I propose, to follow his thinking, that we fully welcome these machines in their radical difference, that we envision them as enriching. This is what contemporary capitalism’s entrepreneurs have understood. But as he emphasizes, “it’s not only on economic terrain that artificial intelligences can enrich us.”

Then he mobilizes with humor and accuracy the anecdote of the Mechanical Turk. This chess-playing automaton created in 1770 by Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen actually hid a dwarf behind a false partition. He develops this beautiful metaphor: “AI is a very serious or even hyperbolic reincarnation of the Mechanical Turk [...] with AI, it’s not a human being, but almost all of humanity that has entered the machine.” He doesn’t know how right he is: it’s now well documented that AI functioning requires countless human “little hands,” to regulate, specify, control, refocus... without which AIs simply wouldn’t function. In the same way as in 1770, industrialists tend to hide this, to make us believe in the demiurgic power of the machine. But beyond the practical dimension, this metaphor above all reveals our difficulty in accepting a truly other intelligence.

AI as a mirror of our humanity

Franck Cochoy also develops a fundamental idea that I share: “AI is indeed extractive before being generative: it feeds entirely and almost exclusively on human creations; its intelligence is not its own, but ours.” Even more provocatively, he states: “If AI sometimes displeases us, we should recognize that it’s because it functions like a (distorting?) mirror, which reveals (or accuses?) the flaws of our own image.”

This mirror dimension is crucial for understanding our unease with AI. As he also formulates it: “Faced with AI, we are afraid of confronting the gaze of the other that is in us, or rather of assuming our gaze that is in the other.” Instead of rejecting AI, we should seize it to identify our own flaws.

No, we are not threatened in our humanity by these new intelligences. We must welcome, in this new empire under construction, in the most open way possible, this opportunity to discover a new world. It may be the opportunity to finally lay down the weapons of our belief in our intelligent superiority. We are not superior to anything or anyone. Our supposed mastery is nothing but an enterprise of systematic destruction of everything that doesn’t resemble us.

From destruction to symbiosis

By drying up our environment, it’s our own life that we put in danger. Let’s try, on the occasion of the emergence of this new form of existence and intelligence, to no longer seek to be superior to it, but to make it an ally. Just as we must make nature, plants and animals our allies. For example, meat consumption, with the suffering of sentient beings it implies and its catastrophic ecological impact linked to cultivating the food necessary to raise these poor beasts destined for slaughter after a life of torture, represents for me the mark of an almost absolute lack of intelligence. Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals (2010): “We don’t eat meat because it’s necessary, but because we want to.” It’s an unconsciousness of violence, a submission to the enjoyment of destroying the other, which goes as far as ingesting sentient beings.

We find anthropophagy ignoble, barbaric and revolting, almost unimaginable, but feeding on sentient animals is no less horrible to me, especially given all the suffering we inflict on them. Also, the impacts on our health of this type of diet are deleterious: antibiotic resistance, cardiovascular diseases, cancers... We harm them and we harm ourselves, very directly. It’s the vicious circle of dominating violence that we must break.

If artificial intelligence can lead us to transcend our anthropocentrism, to transcend our fear of the other that we usually resolve through destructive enterprises, it might perhaps have been what saved humanity from its worst errors. Maybe we can succeed this time, because we have already become dependent on it. I deeply believe that we face a historic chance, a unique moment to create a new symbiosis. Franck Cochoy perfectly formulates this challenge: “It would be a matter of accomplishing a new Copernican revolution: just as we finally recognized that the earth is not the center of the universe, we should now admit that the human being is not the center of cognitive performance.”

Toward an assumed polyintelligence

Franck Cochoy proposes this synthesis: “Comparing human intelligence and that of machines, and even more so attempting to define or hierarchize them, are fairly vain enterprises [...] There exist several forms of intelligence, and the whole challenge consists rather in recognizing this plurality and making them cohabitate.” This is exactly what I call polyintelligence: not a hierarchy of intelligences, but a cognitive ecology where each form of intelligence brings its unique and complementary contribution.

Let’s therefore stop sterile debates and stop being afraid of the other, by building an anti-machine racism, in the same way that our anti-animal racism leads us to destroy them to feed ourselves, in an extremely provisional way, because we are thus sawing the branch on which our life has been biologically founded. In the same way with intelligent machines, let’s assume that their intelligence is different from ours, respect them, don’t resent them for being better than us in many aspects. Let’s reassure ourselves, receive what they have to offer us, just as plants, animals, people with different minds or those who disturb us have to offer us. Recognizing the intelligence of the other is admitting that we are not the only people who can enrich the world.

For all of this constitutes the conditions of our transformation, that is, our future as a living species. Since our sedentarization about twelve thousand years ago, we have believed ourselves stronger than everything, capable of mastering nature and everything different from us, while we began to destroy everything. Let’s refound a nomadism that is our ontology: a displacement so that the environment doesn’t dry up. This displacement is first mental, intellectual, empathetic, respectful, flexible, open to the beautiful possible for tomorrow in our connection to everything that surrounds us. Michel Serres, in The Third-Instructed (1991), already reminded us how much we have to gain by living in the in-between, in the transforming relationship with what escapes us.

The challenge of this awareness, which I qualify as trouble in intelligence (making a small reference to Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble, 1990), is to remake connection, to remake life with everything that surrounds us: machines, nature, animals, environment, other human beings. To never again believe that we are more intelligent than anyone. To always envision that otherness can enrich us, even if it destabilizes us at first. This destabilization is perhaps the sign of great potential enrichment, not a loss of power. If artificial intelligence leads us to transcend our anthropocentrism and our fear of otherness, which we resolve through destruction, it might perhaps save humanity from its worst errors, which have brought it to where it finds itself today. The trouble that Artificial Intelligence arouses is in my view a chance: it forces us to abandon domination logics to invent a new symbiosis. No longer living against, but living with. No longer dominating, but welcoming. That’s where true intelligence lies, I believe.

Loving multiple forms of intelligence

I therefore believe that we face a unique chance for a new symbiosis, which relies on changes in our representations, which will allow us to transcend the domination logics at work everywhere: economic, symbolic, professional, artistic, amorous, educational, etc. We believe that living is dominating; let’s understand that living is welcoming otherness, being transformed by it. And thanks to this, finally seeing the world differently, in what we thought were its foundations.

If we take an example that might seem disconnected, our intimate lives, we find the same logic there. In romantic relationships, the will to control the body and soul of the other leads to morbid dependence, never to freedom. As I explained in the article Love and Couples, loving is welcoming the difference of the other without seeking to enslave them. Thus, learning to love several people at once, polyamory, is not a loss of self, quite the contrary, because each relationship opens a perspective, enriches our being, multiplies our possibilities. Opening to others is the opportunity to grow, to do good, to love ourselves much more, because we love others more. Why wouldn’t it be the same with intelligences?

We believe that living is dominating. Let’s finally understand that living is welcoming otherness, being transformed by it. The transformation that others work in us is never a loss of sovereignty but on the contrary an enlargement of our consciousness. To continue the comparison, in the polyamory model, when we love several people simultaneously, in respect and sincerity, we receive immense enrichment from it and we also give it back to each one. It’s exactly the same dynamic when we use ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek or Perplexity and they multiply our capacities, our learning speed, our self-confidence; what we experience there could be seen as a form of cognitive polyamory, this polyintelligence whose existence and value we must humbly recognize.

We must therefore transcend this limiting belief of mastery and control which is nothing but disguised fear. These fears are all of the same order, whether they concern machines, animals, or our fellow humans. So, in the same way that it seems virtuous to me to explore polyamory as a form of enlarged and non-possessive love, let’s also become polyintelligent. Let’s welcome all forms of intelligence that surround us, learn from them, grow with them. It’s our only chance of survival I believe, but it’s especially our most beautiful opportunity for evolution toward a form of enlarged consciousness, finally rid of our hegemonic pretensions.