Intelligence

Typology

Three Intelligences for the Age of AI

Otto Scharmer:

"Intelligence is not one thing. At a minimum, three forms must be differentiated and integrated.

AI in the form of large language models (LLMs) is a pattern-prediction machine, matching and meshing existing human knowledge at a superhuman speed. Trained on existing data, AI deals extraordinarily well with dynamic complexity. It’s powerful — but structurally backward-looking, even when it appears to look forward.

Organic intelligence (OI) is the intelligence of structurally coupled living systems in ecologies of relationships. It senses multiple perspectives and orients to see with rather than just look at.2 This is where empathic listening lives. OI handles social complexity — the texture of multiple worldviews, cultures, and interests.

Source intelligence (SI) is the intelligence of the whole social field — the social soil from which all perspectives emerge. It is sourced not only from what is but from what is emerging. SI also stands for soil intelligence: the intelligence of the social mycelium running through that soil that connects what looks separate aboveground. Examples are entrepreneurs and leaders who sense and create a future that does not yet exist.

SI is grounded in what Eva Pomeroy and I have called fourth-person knowing: the source from which collective action arises.3 It handles emerging complexity: Where the solution is unknown, the problem keeps changing, and it is unclear who needs to be at the table.

The three intelligences are highly interwoven and nested, with source intelligence at the core and organic and artificial intelligences in the surrounding spheres. An intelligence monoculture — almost entirely dominated by AI — would look like an empty shell. There would still be some hardware. But the living, breathing inner core would be gone, turning the shell into a superhardened iron cage for those trapped inside."

(https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/leaderships-blind-spot-in-the-age-of-ai/)