While tech bros keep promising that AI will replace human workers any day now, the reality is a lot messier. Sure, AI can beat grandmasters at chess and write mediocre poetry, but ask it to fold a fitted sheet or understand why your mom is mad at you. Good luck with that.
The whole “AI versus human intelligence” debate misses the point entirely. Intelligence isn’t some single thing you can measure like height or weight. It’s complicated. Really complicated. AI excels at pattern recognition, data processing, and specific tasks. Give it millions of chess games to study, and yeah, it’ll destroy you. But that same AI can’t tie its shoes. Because it doesn’t have shoes. Or feet.
Intelligence isn’t one thing—it’s complicated, messy, and deeply human in ways AI can’t touch.
What AI does well, it does frighteningly well. Language models can write essays, code programs, and even crack jokes that are almost funny. Image generators create art that looks like it came from actual artists. Some medical AI systems spot cancer better than doctors. That’s not nothing.
But here’s where it gets weird. These systems don’t “understand” anything. They’re pattern-matching machines on steroids. A language model doesn’t know what words mean any more than a calculator knows what numbers are. It just follows rules really, really well.
Meanwhile, humans do things AI can’t touch. We navigate social situations, understand context, and make judgment calls based on incomplete information. We create meaning from nothing. We fall in love, hold grudges, and somehow know when someone’s lying just by looking at them.
The question isn’t whether AI has exceeded human intelligence. It’s whether we’re even talking about the same thing. AI has definitely exceeded humans at specific tasks. No human can process data like a computer. But intelligence? That messy, creative, sometimes irrational thing humans do?
Different game entirely.
So when someone tells you AI has surpassed human intelligence, ask them this: Can their AI comfort a crying child? Can it know when to break the rules? Can it appreciate a sunset without being programmed to?
Thought so.
