Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
In Life 3.0, Max Tegmark depicts the debate as a conversation between two horses discussing the rise of the internal combustion engine in 1900. One predicts “new jobs for horses. . . . That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.” For most horses, alas, the “new job” was to be pet food.