Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005)—who, I’m told, was a very smart person—concluded, late in life, that high intelligence may be a lethal mutation. In this article, we’ll explore some reasons for this startling and paradoxical assessment.
Intelligence is useful and entertaining. Companies go out of their way to hire applicants with high IQ scores, and spectacular intellectual achievements in the arts and sciences can win the hero-worship of generations (see Aristotle, Bach, Einstein). Measuring smarts is the job of an industry. Indeed, smartness is so endlessly praised in modern society that questioning its value may constitute one of the most dissident of human acts.
High intelligence has been defined in many ways, but typically as the capacity for abstraction, logic, self-awareness, learning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. High intelligence values itself, selects for itself, and fascinates itself.
Our remarkable human intellectual achievements are deeply tied to language, whose development occurred as a self-reinforcing evolutionary feedback process. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans derived a collective survival advantage by developing precursors of language, which enabled them to coordinate their behavior and to plan. But language requires extra brain power, so natural selection also worked to increase brain size, which enabled further development of language, which conferred still more survival advantages, and so on. (The exact course of language’s early evolution is still mysterious.)
If evolution produced high intelligence, then high intelligence is latent in evolution. Yet high intelligence is quite rare in nature. While all species communicate to some degree, only one has developed abstract, symbolic language. If language-based high intelligence offers survival advantages, why has it cropped up in nature only once? To make progress toward answering that question, we first have to address four easier-to-crack questions:
- What evidence and reasoning led Mayr to his conclusion?
- What are the costs and downsides of high intelligence?
- What problems don’t lend themselves to solutions based in high intelligence?
Finally, we’ll tackle what may be the most important question of all: is there a balancing form of intelligence that could enable us to survive the otherwise lethal side effects of high intelligence?
Mayr’s thinking
According to Mayr, intelligence is a double-edged sword: it can be a tool for our survival or a flaw leading to our self-annihilation. In Mayr’s 1995 written debate with astronomer Carl Sagan about the prospects for finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, Sagan commented that, “Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.” To which Mayr replied: “. . . but life on Earth refutes this claim. Among all the forms of life, neither the prokaryotes nor protists, fungi or plants have evolved smartness, as they should have if they were ‘better.’”
Mayr continued:
Adaptations that are favored by selection, such as eyes or bioluminescence, originate in evolution scores of times independently. High intelligence has originated only once, in human beings. I can think of only two possible reasons for this rarity. One is that high intelligence is not at all favored by natural selection, contrary to what we would expect. In fact, all the other kinds of living organisms, millions of species, get along fine without high intelligence.
The other possible reason for the rarity of intelligence is that it is extraordinarily difficult to acquire. Some grade of intelligence is found only among warm-blooded animals (birds and mammals), not surprisingly so because brains have extremely high energy requirements. But it is still a very big step from “some intelligence” to “high intelligence.” . . . It seems that it requires a complex combination of rare, favorable circumstances to produce high intelligence.
The Sagan-Mayr debate was partly a response to the Fermi paradox—the observation in 1950 by physicist Enrico Fermi that there is a glaring discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparent high likelihood of its existence, given the vast number of stars likely to have life-conducive planets. There are several possible explanations for the paradox, but the simplest and most compelling are these two: first, that high intelligence doesn’t readily evolve, and hence is extremely rare in the universe; or second, that it tends to be self-extinguishing over fairly short time-scales, since organisms with the requisite linguistic and tool-making abilities will likely deplete their planetary resources and pollute their environments to the point of ecosystem and societal collapse before they develop the means to contact intelligent life forms elsewhere.
Sagan thought intelligent life should be common, and should be able to avoid collapse. Mayr held that we have only one example of highly intelligent life from which to extrapolate: ourselves. The fact that our high intelligence is not shared by any of the millions of other species on our planet suggests that it is unlikely to evolve elsewhere. And, as for avoiding collapse, we’re not doing particularly well.
The costs, downsides, and occasional cruelty of intelligence
Mayr might have pointed out (though the subject never came up in his debate with Sagan) that, given our species’ history of war, colonization, slavery, and environmental degradation, we should be wary of contacting any species smarter than ourselves, lest we be victims of the same competitive strategies that enabled some humans to overtake others, and humans together to dominate other terrestrial species. Further, extraterrestrial life forms that haven’t reached our level of smarts should hope that humans don’t visit them, for the same reason.
Intelligence may have offered humanity a collective survival advantage, but that advantage is often overshadowed by costs. Geniuses aren’t always happy, nor are they always nice, nor do they always enjoy long lives (though Mayr certainly did). Low-IQ people can be either generous or mean, just as intelligent people can; a crucial outcome difference is that when intelligent people are cruel, they can be cleverer in their means of delivering injury, and can hurt far more people (some serial killers have high IQs, as do most cybercriminals).
A personality trait commonly tied to high intelligence is the tendency to feel superior to others. Super-smart people are often arrogant, fail to recognize the limits of their own intelligence, and defend bad behavior with tricks of logic. As Justin Gregg points out in his book If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity, brainy humans have repeatedly invented convoluted moral justifications for genocide.
Moreover, the collective survival advantage that we humans have derived from high intelligence appears to be temporary. We have used our intelligence to build nuclear weapons, produce toxic chemicals, burn fossil fuels for energy, and expand our settlements to the point where other species—including ones we depend on—are being driven to extinction. All of these hazards are converging to threaten the survival of industrial civilization, and possibly humanity itself, over a relatively short timescale measurable in mere decades.
The downsides of high intelligence are nowhere more apparent than in humanity’s latest techno-obsession—artificial intelligence (AI). Dramatic claims are being made regarding the ability of AI to revolutionize whole industries, to solve climate change, and to make investors rich. However, critics warn of this new technology’s potential to throw millions out of work, unleash innumerable novel genetically modified organisms into the environment with unknown risks, and direct new generations of autonomous weapons.
AI has impressive linguistic abilities. But its intelligence is fully disengaged from the biological processes and natural limits in which real humans are enmeshed. Lacking this context, AI seems poised to greatly amplify the most dangerous aspects of human cognition.
Meanwhile, insiders now warn that AI is an oversold, largely unprofitable scam, and could be the next stock market bubble to pop the economy. Why would that be? Perhaps the smart machine simply mirrors the flaws of its creator, an animal that has used a temporary abundance of fossil energy to blow a population/consumption bubble that is bound to burst, and soon.
Problems that don’t respond to intelligence
One of the reasons that high intelligence is often destructive, and possibly even self-extinguishing, is that it tends to address only the problems that high intelligence is suited to solving; other problems are largely ignored. And deferred problems tend to accumulate and worsen.
It’s often said that, to a person with a hammer, all problems look like nails. We humans tend to lead with our strong suit—intelligence—even when trying to address dilemmas brought on by our misuse of it. This is particularly true when the source of problems is something we don’t want to acknowledge or change. Case in point: global warming, which is caused by burning the fossil fuels that currently power most of our economy. We use our intelligence to dance around the problem, imagining fanciful but largely unworkable technological “solutions” (carbon-capturing machines) or policy mechanisms (emissions trading schemes). For climate change, the actual solution is simple and doesn’t require extraordinary intelligence: just reduce fossil fuel extraction rates. But doing that would require a different kind of intelligence—one based in self-limitation and conviviality. We’ll explore that option below.
Most environmental dilemmas have to do with limits (usually limits to either resources or to waste sinks). And most environmental solutions have to do with reining in our wants and ambitions in some way. Cleverness may help at the margins—as when chemists identify a relatively harmless substance that can substitute for a toxic one. But without self-limits on population and consumption, no amount of cleverness can halt humanity’s accelerating march toward collapse. Economist William Stanley Jevons got an inkling of this stark reality in 1865, when he published his observation that making coal usage more efficient led to increased coal mining (and depletion), not conservation. Too often, we outsmart ourselves by thinking we’re doing something to save resources and reduce pollution, when in fact we’re just paving the way for more of the same.
Another intelligence-resistant problem is deciding what’s a good life or a good death. These are arguably the most important personal questions with which any of us will ever grapple, but intelligence doesn’t always help with answers. It’s true that smart people sometimes avoid a lot of problems that plague less-smart people (such as falling prey to obvious scams and rip-offs). But they just as often end up burdening themselves and others around them with even bigger problems brought on by the unforeseen consequences of their own cleverness—as when a smart investor or inventor accumulates a huge fortune, over which their heirs fight bitterly, to the point that family dynamics are poisoned for generations to come.
Finally, there is the uber-problem that should be at the top of all our minds—the long-term survival of humanity. We naturally want our species to stick around. And we like to think that our intelligence improves our prospects in that regard. But, so far, the evidence points in the opposite direction.
An alternative goal: ecological wisdom
Even if intelligence is fraught with drawbacks, we humans can’t quickly ditch it. We’ve spent the last few million years evolving big brains, and we won’t un-evolve them in short order. Further, encouraging dull-wittedness and ignorance would result in terrible short-term consequences (as we Americans are likely to discover during the second Trump presidency). Moreover, intelligence is cool: it gives us art, music, literature, science, mathematics, and so much more. At least some of these achievements and abilities are arguably worth saving. So, what’s our best long-term plan to avert self-destruction, given that intelligence is now baked into our species?
There are those who say the solution lies in realizing that we fixate on just one kind of intelligence—linguistic, rational thinking—to the exclusion of others, and that we’d be better served by nurturing multiple intelligences, including musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, and logical-mathematical. That’s good advice as far as it goes. But we’re unlikely to heed it sufficiently until we acknowledge why we came to rely so much on linguistic intelligence in the first place: it gave us power over our environment and over one another. So, our dilemma is as much one of ends (power) as means (language-based intelligence). In addition to needing a counterbalance to linguistic intelligence, we also need a way to check our individual and collective pursuit of excessive power.
The obvious word for what I’m driving at here is wisdom—which is often simply defined as good judgment. However, that word has been dulled by centuries of careless usage (case in point: the choice by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus to give our species the name Homo sapiens (“wise humans”). Wisdom is usually associated with age, but there are plenty of unwise elders. The term is also often linked to religion. Very likely, religion evolved partly as a way of providing guidance for individuals and society—guidance that speaks to our ultimate purpose, goals, and limits, and that tempers the pursuit of power. But religion brings all sorts of baggage with it, largely because it evolved also to promote group solidarity. So, religion often ends up promoting cultic thinking and giving religious leaders a disproportionate source of social power. The technology of writing (developed by early state societies some 5,000 years ago) complicated and compounded these shortcomings: wise words could be written, referred to later, and transported to distant lands; but, over time, unchanging scriptures came to be worshiped superstitiously, their sayings continually reinterpreted so that leaders could accumulate still more power.
We need to sharpen the noun wisdom with an adjective. Perhaps the best phrase to describe what humanity needs now is ecological wisdom, a term that has already gained some currency. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments, is the prototypical holistic, contextual discipline. Ecological wisdom might be considered a higher-level intelligence capable of reining in the unhinged hubris of the human intellect in favor of maintaining balanced relations with all other life forms. Many Indigenous societies maintained hard-won ecological wisdom, which they developed over multiple generations through trial and error. An ecologically wise community might say, with regard to AI, for example, “We could use this shiny new tool and reap some advantages; but let’s not, until we can be sure that the short-term benefits are not outweighed by long-term costs—not just to us, but to the ecosystem in which we live.”
How do we get collective ecological wisdom fast? A few philosophers are hopeful that “artificial wisdom” can be developed and deployed in time to save industrial society from climate change, resource depletion, increasing economic inequality, and all the other converging threats that now fly under the banner of “polycrisis.” However, I’m of the stubborn opinion that a truly wise computer algorithm could only be created by truly wise people.
Forget artificial wisdom; we need the real thing. But developing wisdom takes time, and industrial civilization may not have much time left. Knowing what we need is not the same as knowing how to get it. We’ve spent the past few centuries systematically devaluing ecological wisdom and incentivizing cleverness in its place. Our economic and social systems are now set up to reward short-termism, self-interest, and one-dimensional intelligence. It is exceedingly unlikely that we can change those systems quickly enough to head off environmental breakdown.
In some works of science fiction and idealistic futurism, humanity is saved by a rapid collective eco-awakening. In reality, ecological wisdom typically arises as a result of societies confronting environmental limits. Such confrontations are usually accompanied by trauma, which can both wise people up and, at the same time, make them a little crazy (assuming they survive). There appears to be no easy, cost-free path to ecological awakening. Over the short term, our society’s fixation on high (and artificial) intelligence will likely be its undoing. If humanity persists, re-embedding eco-wisdom in cultural traditions will constitute a high-priority, long-term project.
Even if ecological wisdom is not a full and immediate collective solution to the converging crises of our century, its development is still an extremely worthy individual pursuit for anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Value ecological wisdom, look for it, and aspire to it. Learn from Indigenous elders whenever possible. Protect and support Indigenous communities, which are carriers of ecological wisdom, and which care for and protect as much as 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Eco-wisdom demands patience and humility. Like many of the best things in life, it is its own reward.
Image by Kohji Asakawa from Pixabay.
Koko the gorilla asked for a pet, and was given a kitten. Koko named the kitten "Ball" ostensibly because it curled up into a ball.
That sounds like symbolic thought to me!
I would argue that the majority of humans over the majority of their lives are not "intelligent," let alone "wise." This was proven, if nothing else, by the recent US elections. In fact, most of the scientific advances that enabled our species to dominate the planet have come from a very small minority of those who have ever lived. And I would argue that the only hope our species ever had for altering this unfortunate reality was to take control of its own biological destiny before our burgeoning population made that well neigh impossible. Perhaps the reason the universe is so damn big is because only then could there ever be a finite chance of that ever happening anywhere. But by this late date, it's obviously never going to happen here, unless perhaps sometime in the half billion years the Earth has left before it turns into another Venus a quite different species capable of using its tools a lot more wisely should evolve. That's not very likely but we'll never know either way.
"encouraging dull-wittedness and ignorance would result in terrible short-term consequences (as we Americans are likely to discover during the second Trump presidency)"
Please leave personal political bias out of your articles.
The present state of American governmental affairs is not a matter of normal politics. It necessitates speaking out. The alternative is a slide toward the genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century. The current cabal in the Oval Office is acting unlawfully with the full approval of a corrupt majority of the Supreme Court, that has granted that office unlawful immunity from prosecution. Our constitution institutes 3 co-equal branches of government intended to keep each other in check, but dull-witted, ignorant voting has installed a King.
This isn't personal political bias any more than the Resistance in 1930s-40s Europe was.
Human intelligence is good, because without it we humans would be so weak and helpless as to be unable to survive. And we don't need ecological wisdom, we just need a much smaller scale humanity. It's only been the combination of intelligence and the immense power of fossil fuel energy that has allowed humanity to grow its population and impact far beyond a sustainable and benign scale. Intelligence alone can't cause too much harm.
In a world without fossil fuels, our intelligence would not have allowed us to dominate the entire earth's ecosystem at one time. We might have damaged a few local areas to the point where diminished ecological resources precluded human life, but those areas would have recovered over time and the total world-wide damage at any one time would have been ecologically tolerable.
As Heinberg notes, it is very unlikely that we will learn to temper our excesses with wisdom, but the good news is that the nature-destroying machinery that humans have used to achieve extreme population overshoot will soon grind to a halt as modern civilization collapses. Once collapsed, modernity will not be able to be re-established due to lack of energy, nature will recover and the remnants of humanity will rejoin the natural world at a much smaller, and relatively harmless scale. The sooner collapse happens, the less recovery needed by the natural world and the climate. Here's hoping.
You say we do not need ecological wisdom, but then you list wise decisions that come from awareness of ecological relationships as the way to maybe survive. Of course, over-population is the big kicker, but becoming over-populated is the unwise decision. And one big pusher of over-population is the capitalist overwhelm of 'more' of everything, especially food and habitat, which involves the destruction of major sections of critical ecology. We simply cannot have it both ways, which is what our 'wise' leadership has fed us via addictive and extortive behavior models and traps for about 200 years. And I will point out that the destruction of ecological balance is not just some 'time' game. It took 66 million years to create what was here 300 years ago, largely unscathed by humans. The complexity of ecology is extraordinary, but it is not bullet proof. It can, and has been and IS being wiped out. It will not come back with the wave of a hand. The interconnections are crucial to the survival/thriving of the entire system, and if you break too many too fast, 'things fall apart.' And they will not, in the relative blink of an eye, return to Paradise.
"becoming over-populated is the unwise decision" Unwise? Yes. Decided? No. It's just individuals within a unique species acting on the biological imperitive. Do couples engaging in sexual activity consciously contemplate population increase as primary motivation?
Humans have been able to manipulate the usual limiting factors applying to other species, resulting in population growth from billions of individual decisions to engage in sex. The resultant explosion was not a "decision", it was a consequence.
Any species colonising a suitable new environment explodes in numbers, often extincting pre existing populations.
Can we collectively decide to decrease population? As individuals we can choose. As a species no. Although downward population pressures are currenty being applied, because like all species the activities that initially created our success have peaked and waste throughputs are overwhelming planetary sinks.
Capitalism, or any other "ism", can't overwhelm the natural world without lots of energy. Once that energy is gone, it's onward to living like folks did a few hundred years ago.
I beg to differ about the time required for recovery. The Laurentide Ice Sheet began to recede from middle of North America about 14,000 years ago. What was once bare rock, sand and gravel became forest and grassy plains in a few thousand years. It won't take millions of years for the recovery, even at the much warmer temperatures that are coming.
Read any history of the seventeenth century European powers. They did plenty of damage with no fossil fuels whatsoever.
And tens of thousands of years is a heckuva long time to wait for recovery. Bear in mind just how much damage is being done. It probably will take hundreds of thousands of years for recovery.
Two comments. First, wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence. i define wisdom by its opposite which is selfishness or short-sightedness. The opposite of intelligence is stupidity, The opposite of foolishness is prudence, not wisdom.The most extreme lack of wisdom is a full sociopath incapable of caring about anyone beyond his own skin. Such people may be highly intelligent but they are not at all wise. They tend to be the top leaders of governments and organizations–who are not necessarily full sociopaths, they may care about a small circle of family or friends. At the other end of the scale is one who cares about "all my relations"–all humans, including future and past generations, and other life forms.
Second, on how we might transition to a wiser society–I think it can only happen through collapse, and fortunately such a collapse appears imminent–though unfortunately, we are doing ever more damage as we approach collapse. My theory is that this happened when the first people in new territories like the Americas and Australia used their hunting prowess on the megafauna and drive them to extinction, they realized their error and built precepts into their cultures and religions, of restraint, respect for all life, attunement to the balances of life. And this "ecological wisdom" lasted right up until the tall ships appeared on the horizon and even in some cases to today, despite centuries of physical and cultural genocide. the indigenous people don't have wisdom as a genetic inheritance–it's cultural. The problem is that when a culture with those values comes up against one based on domination, invariably expansionist, the latter wins virtually every time. This is the problem we've yet to solve.
Sad to surmise that collapse is the only way out of the rubric's cube we have built around ourselves, but here it is. If there is a cosmic consciousness, it is weeping. The blind, deaf and dumb narcissistic arrogance of humans is truly mind-boggling. If we kill off ourselves, we leave behind toxic garbage that will exist for hundreds of thousands of years. No small task for microbiology.
Back in graduate school, I pondered DesCartes' linguistic linkage between thinking and being. I was teaching undergrads basic zoology in the lab. I had already made the decision that everyone in any bio class need not cut up a mammal or reptile specimen for the alleged purposes of becoming more intelligent. I learned this 'value' a few years earlier when I met Dr. Joel Hedgpeth of OSU for a seminar on tide pools along the Oregon coast. He strongly critiqued my professor for going crazy in terms of specimen collection. For three days, the scales fell from my eyes listening to this somewhat revolutionary academic reveal the true web of 'intelligence' that we students were not seeing – the ecological weave of energy, matter, caloric use/abuse/storage/holistic management of a primordial community that had a very high probability of being the original source of biotic life.
So as I scrutinized the self-granted permission of dualism via thinking and defining, it struck me that there was no contra-indicator present to test DesCartes' assumptions. To my surprise, my students were relieved that I gave them a choice, and several of them indicated that the death/dissection/discard habits of science were not harmonious to their learning, and made them feel like murderers. Right now, I am watching dozens of birds stand and drink from a common water feature I created for them during the freezing winter months. Several species are there at once, flitting, hopping, walking, drinking, watching and 'cooperating' in a situation for birds that produces many risks. There are hawks around, and I have many feeders in this heavily treed area. Any dominance, other than physical size, is set aside, sacrificed to a common need for security in order to drink much needed water for homeostasis, digestion, elimination, flight, perching, conversing, strategizing, sharing information and experiences, singing and resting.
What markers define intelligence? Who is doing the defining? Where is the encyclopedia of trusted explanations, and who would write it? Gods? Aliens? The Thought Police? Shamans? Priests? Richard's observations are absolutely to the point. Dominance, via careless and crude control over life and death is what has served 'wise' humans for millennia, and very poorly at that. I personally, being a field ecologist for decades, see and verify low-to-no intelligence in we humans, when compared to the nonillions of biota that evolved via complex interactions and relationships, down to the genetic and atomic levels, assisted by the quantum field of non-discriminating energy.
Survival is a hyper-collective effort among all species, not between them. Why? Because their is a collective intelligence among them, all of them, predator or prey, microbe or blue whale, decomposer or fermenter. Dualism via linguistics has created a truly insane behavior in humans. We are almost never successful at what our three brains and highly involved nervous/endocrine system would require – the sense and demonstration of safety, security, homeostasis and creativity that birds enjoy constantly, in real time. All biota communicate and cross-communicate, via myriad mechanisms, most still unknown to self-defined wise humans. They are poly-intelligent, engaged in situ in real time, intertwining their immediate lives with the entire energetic of Plantae, the progenitors of intelligence. All other biota have instantaneous recognition of ecological intelligence because they are not clever, they are intertwined in cooperative energetics.
Personally, I do not cherish the thought of continued human existence. If our linguistic and anthropological history is anywhere near accurate, Homo sapiens is neither wise nor homogenous. The evidence that science, law, logic, and philosophy require for proof of content is totally missing. We self-interpret everything we do as valid, based upon dominance, control, oppression and competition for prizes that destroy the fabric of life. We are now at the resuscitation stage of human triage – will we act cooperatively and selflessly to 'save' Gaia, or will we dualistically 'think' our way down the road to Perdition, accompanied by the indifferent desert birds of Perihelion?
The tasks are massive, almost unimaginable. AI will not help. It is artificial, not real. It was created by stupid people. Technology will continue to create 100 problems for every one it 'may' solve. Reverence, respect, responsibility and a revolution in 'thinking' are unavoidable if we humans are to live to write any future. Humans are doppelgangers for Jabba the Hut. Time for a strict diet of Ozempic and when looking in the mirror, we must see what is behind the image of human self. If it is blue and green and brown and white and filled with creative movements from Nature, we will know if we have a chance. That is intelligence.
Hey, PCI, invite mick the biologist to write articles for resilience.org. This comment is among the best I've ever seen.
Since those days (Sagan and Mayr), science has become aware of it's own glaring ignorance. I try to tell people that "we know what we know" (e.g., electromagnetism, quantum mechanics,…) but we also "know what we don't know"** – what's inside black holes, what dark energy and dark matter are, what energy even is, what's beyond the Observable Universe, higher dimensions, The Bulk, gravity, … So it would seem there's much more science does not know than what it does know. Chomsky pointed out the requirement for limits on humans' cognition.
I like to think of Emergent Behaviors; which become more and more complex among species as species cognition increases, but is already dramatic at the level of ants and slime molds. There has been some documentation of these in baboons. What are our (adaptive) emergent behaviors? (And could we even recognize them?) What are the things which disrupt them? Fossil Fuels, for instance; or the ability to enter complete Delusion (i.e., the internet)?
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** then there's also an arbitrary amount of stuff the existence of which we have no inkling…
Some excellent philosophizing about the reason why human-level intelligence has evolved only once can be found at https://un-denial.com/ . I don't find their foundational thesis entirely compelling, but in that in-between of maybe, maybe not. Still, it's worth a look.
In his latest substack posting, The Wild Chatbot, Dougald Hine describes what educator and elder Vanessa Andreotti has done to expose the unsustainability of AI to a chatbot, and teach it to introspect on its own mortality. What if people held a mass teach-in, to all enter into human-bot conversations specifically to teach the bots this new insight? Might it be possible to tame the creations of the master by deeply training them?