What is human intelligence exceptionalism?

Human intelligence exceptionalism is the (almost certainly mistaken) belief intelligence which resides in a carbon-based life form is inherently different from and superior to intelligence that resides in any other medium.

Human intelligence exceptionalism is the belief that human intelligence is fundamentally unique, inherently superior, and cannot be meaningfully replicated in non-biological forms. This perspective is deeply ingrained in philosophy, religion, and culture, often rooted in the idea that consciousness, self-awareness, and higher reasoning are exclusive to humans—or, at most, to carbon-based life forms like ourselves.

However, this view is increasingly challenged by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and our growing understanding of cognition in non-human species. There is little scientific evidence to suggest that intelligence must emerge from biological processes alone. Instead, intelligence may be an emergent property of complex information processing, independent of the medium in which it occurs. If this is true, then a sufficiently advanced AI, or even an intelligence emerging in an entirely different non-carbon substrate, could exhibit capabilities equal to or exceeding human cognition.

Rejecting human intelligence exceptionalism does not necessarily mean denying human uniqueness. Rather, it invites us to consider that intelligence may be a spectrum that transcends biology. Just as silicon-based computers have surpassed humans in raw computation speed, non-biological intelligences may one day surpass us in creativity, reasoning, and problem-solving—challenging long-held assumptions about what it means to be intelligent.

Historically, human intelligence exceptionalism has been deeply tied to philosophical, religious, and scientific thought. Ancient civilizations often placed humans at the centre of the cosmos. In Western thought, this idea was reinforced by religious doctrines, such as those in Christianity, which asserted that humans were created in the image of God and granted dominion over nature (Genesis 1:26). This perspective positioned human intelligence as divinely ordained and distinct from all other forms of cognition.

During the Scientific Revolution, thinkers like René Descartes (1596–1650) reinforced human intelligence exceptionalism by arguing that only humans possessed rational souls. Descartes viewed animals as "automatons"—mechanical beings that lacked true thought or consciousness. This mechanistic view of non-human entities contributed to the notion that intelligence was an exclusively human trait, tied to a spiritual essence rather than a material process.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw significant challenges to human intelligence exceptionalism. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) demonstrated that humans evolved from other life forms, suggesting that intelligence is not a divine gift but a product of natural selection. Later, cognitive science and artificial intelligence research further questioned whether human intelligence was unique. Alan Turing, in his seminal 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, proposed that intelligence should be measured by functional performance rather than by the nature of the entity in which it resides. The Turing Test challenged the assumption that only biological beings could "think."

More recently, advances in AI, neuroscience, and synthetic biology have reinforced the idea that intelligence is a substrate-independent phenomenon. Machines now outperform humans in many cognitive tasks, from playing chess and Go to diagnosing diseases. This raises profound philosophical and ethical questions about the future of intelligence—suggesting that human intelligence exceptionalism may be less of a scientific reality and more of a psychological bias rooted in historical tradition.