Bear with me for a minute, and let's consider a counter-narrative. For years and maybe even decades, the future of artificial intelligence (AI) has been framed as a countdown to an inevitable result. At some point, we are told, machines will cross a threshold and become "general" and capable of understanding across domains the way humans do. The moment is often imagined as a kind of cognitive sunrise or epiphany.

This counter-narrative deserves a closer look.

What if that moment never arrives? What if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is not delayed, but conceptually misframed? And, perhaps most curious to me, what if “general intelligence” is not a thing that can exist apart from a living and autobiographical mind?

We often think of intelligence as if it were a type of cognitive singularity. That's a convenient construct, but it misses what a human mind actually is. Our mental life is layered, as perception, emotion, memory, language, social inference, and moral intuition are all woven together by a persistent self that carries experience forward through time.

What we call “general intelligence” may already........

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