On Taxidermied Intelligence & The State of AI

In my mid-twenties, I became particularly interested in how people determined who was considered smart or not. I routinely asked people I met who they thought was the most intelligent person they knew, and why. Invariably, the answer was the person who could speak the most intelligently on a topic.

That makes sense. But as we all know, knowing a thing and knowing how to talk about a thing are not the same.

And this is where we are with AI.

AI had to narrow intelligence into something it could work with. That means structured language, pattern recognition, and fluent phrasing. That’s the only way it could even start.

But to build a system like that, you have to flatten what intelligence even is. The parts that matter most, how something feels in your hand, how you move through a space, how you just know when something’s off, don’t make it in.

Here is a term I’ve been using and want to share: Taxidermied Intelligence.

In taxidermy, we take an animal, pose it in a certain way, and try to keep the visual details as close to the original as we can. That can be helpful. It lets you look closely at something you might never see alive. But what makes the animal what it is including how it moves, how it behaves, how it acts in the world, is gone. That’s just the nature of the process. There isn’t a way to keep that in.

That’s how AI works. It holds the surface shape of intelligence, but the rest doesn’t come through.

I don’t reject what AI can do, I use it (many times a day in fact), and as a product person I am often in awe of it. But a lot of people seem so focused on this one dimension of intelligence that they’ve stopped seeing the others. And the truth is, those other kinds of knowing are the ones we actually rely on every day.

Elon Musk once said humanity might just be the boot loader for AI. To be fair, he said he hopes that’s not true—but he’s starting to think it is. I think that view only makes sense if you’re so deep in a tech-centric mindset that you’ve lost sight of what knowing really is.

Knowing is physical. It’s emotional. It’s tacit. It comes from use, from being used every day in our lives. We know it without knowing we do.

At the risk of romanticism, it’s the invisible knowledge that makes relationships, life, and the world work. We can not lose sight of that.