Lightning Talk: Forget AI. What the world needs most is NI.
Andrew Davis argues that amid the frenzy around artificial intelligence, humanity is overlooking its most powerful resource: natural intelligence (NI) — the intelligence found in plants, animals, and human minds. He frames the human brain as the most advanced computing system on the planet and challenges technologists to redirect their attention toward understanding and optimizing how that system works. Drawing on concepts like gradient descent, donut economics, and the tension between local and global optima, Davis makes the case that true "winning" means pursuing long-term happiness and freedom from suffering — for ourselves and for society at large. In this talk, you'll learn how three principles — clarification, amplification, and simplification — can be applied to human thinking and behavior to better align individual actions with broader, more meaningful outcomes.
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Andrew Davis
Nice to be back here.
My name is Andrew Davis, and I want to invite you to forget AI. What the world needs now is NI. So NI is natural intelligence. It is the opposite of artificial intelligence. It is the intelligence created by nature: plant, animal, and human intelligence.
I happen to have an opportunity to work with an NI system at work. It is the most advanced computer on the planet: 86 billion parallel processors, 100 trillion network connections, holographic data storage, autonomous decision-making. And to top it all off, it's sustainable and energy-efficient.
This is a system diagram of the system that I use at work. I see a lot of you seem to be using similar equipment, so I hope you're getting good mileage out of it. Very good.
So I want to talk to you about wiring the winning organism. So to wire the winning organism, we first have to define winning. What does winning mean?
I would say winning means being happy and being free from suffering. If you're happy and you're free from suffering, you're winning. If you're not happy, not free from suffering, I would say you're not yet winning to the degree you would like to be.
But we need to think a little bit more about this. We want to think about this for the long term as well, and at what cost? At what cost to ourselves, at what cost to others, are we pursuing this goal of happiness and freedom from suffering? And also, importantly, who's included in this? Whose happiness are we talking about?
So it wouldn't be a proper talk on AI without mentioning gradient descent. It's a mathematical concept, but you can understand it by simply: water flows downhill. But for living organisms, our natural intelligence always guides us towards more happiness and less suffering. So we're always moving towards more happiness and away from suffering.
But there can be local minima when you're looking at gradient descent. And so local minima could be just comfort, right? What's most comfortable for me right now, what makes me happiest right now, and avoids suffering right now, is not necessarily the global minimum: what's best for me long term, what's best for everybody long term.
So when we talk about global versus local optima, to give an illustration, a global optimum would be doughnut economics. You can look this up. It's basically how can we have a civilization that's technologically advanced enough to support all of our social needs, but without being over-industrialized to exceed our ecological capacity. That's doughnut economics.
An example of local optima would be doughnuts.
So at the workshop the other day, Steve Spear kept saying, I kept hearing him say, "How can we maximize the delivery of value to society? Maximize the delivery of value to society." We often don't even specify delivery of value to what or to whom. That is the broadest possible perspective. We need to keep this big picture.
And we can think about this even using these same principles from Wiring the Winning Organization, through specification, amplification, and simplification. Thinking about these basic principles, we can even apply these internally.
Specification: just take a deep breath, right? It just starts there. Just slow down a little bit. Think, feel.
When we come to amplification, one of the things we want to amplify is thinking about what is the potential future impact of our present behaviors. So we think about our present behaviors, and we want to amplify our understanding and our experience of what the future impact of that would be. That's an example of amplification.
And on the simplification front, we want to make the problem easier to solve. And one of the most simple ways of this is most problems can be solved by patient acceptance. The vast majority of the world's problems can be solved in the simplest way.
Basically, we are on the inside looking out at the world, and we think we have all of these massive problems to solve. And we do, from one point of view. But if you can be patient, if you can accept difficulties, if you can accept a little bit of discomfort, then you can solve the vast majority of your problems. It doesn't mean inaction, but it means patience and acceptance.
So I want to leave you with this thought: stay human.
Thank you very much.