Street Smarts - Sept 19 2026

 

Street Smarts

Sept 19 2026

There are dumb animals

with an instinct for survival.

Cunning thugs

getting by on street smarts.

The witless savant

reciting pi

until someone makes him stop.

I’m pretty much average,

although like to flatter myself

perhaps a little above.

But intelligence is many things.

You can do algebra in your head

but be stunted emotionally. 

Can dunk a basketball,

but be incurious

about gravity

and the workings of the hand.

Can be a superhuman machine

that reasons infallibly,

but is immune

to moral constraint.

They call it artificial,

which I assume means man-made.

While we are organic,

either products of nature

or children of God. 

Embodied, not soldered.

In touch with the world

instead of determined by circuits

that either switch from on to off

or ponder

in quantum uncertainty. 

And enmeshed in reality,

instead of fed

a reductionist facsimile.

We know belonging and acceptance

love and loss

grief and death.

Are flawed

and hopelessly subjective.

Aren’t smart enough

to do simple sums in our heads,

or reproduce

the periodic table.

But we know that clutch in the chest

when we stumble on beauty,

the feeling of smallness

when faced with awe.

We are dumb animals

but have somehow carried on

for countless millennia. 

So when artificial intelligence

kills us all

will the machines survive?

Will they flourish?

Will mechanical life find meaning

in a virtual world

where nothing feels hunger

or dreams beneath the stars?

I’ve been reading so much about A.I. — mostly dire warnings of economic collapse and human extinction — and wanted to write about it.  But the temptation for someone like me is to write an essay disguised as a poem: a polemic, a point of view, a logical argument. So I needed a way in that would get me out that categorical and argumentative way of thinking. Nothing about the pros and cons of data centres, the potential stock marker bubble, the alarming cases of A.I. going rogue (incidents its creators euphemistically call “misalignment”), the stunted worldview of the tech bros, or the failure of geriatric politicians — who don’t understand the internet, let alone A.I. — to effectively regulate.

And nothing about the big question that looms over us all:  will the A.I. we have created always be merely instrumental, or will it achieve sentience, a form of consciousness? Might it have already? 

So I thought about types of intelligence. And the natural corollary:  can a machine be called super-intelligent when its intelligence is limited to a single kind?