Dear Reader,

The conversation everyone wants to have right now is about artificial intelligence. And whether you think AI is the anti-Christ (just one more cog in the Machine) or the technological Savior of the downtrodden proletariat, you’re probably sure that it’s going to change the world. Day after day, news agencies tell us how AI stocks are doing (up again today!) and which companies are laying off workers to replace them with AI—or which ones promise to remain human dependent. Influencers discuss which pet-named AI option is best for completing homework. Humanists, whose jobs have been in woeful decline long before Chat came on the scene, have taken to the pages of countless magazines to explain why AI cannot do what they do. The questions on everyone’s minds are: What do we do about AI? How should we engage with this new technology? And what does it mean to be human in an era where humanity—long the lone intellectual superpower—is no longer the “smartest” thing on earth? Anxiety is high and opinion are bountiful.

A fundamental assumption in the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence is that it is intelligent. The term shapes our understanding of the thing. We project ourselves and our rationality onto our creation, and in the ways that we define and consider this new technology, we bound our own self-knowledge. We grapple with the meaning of our intelligence by deciding how we relate to the machine. We use flat and finite reflections to see our own image and likeness. But a mirror cannot show us exactly what another person sees (let alone what the Maker sees). For this reason, humanist accounts that merely delineate the differences between human and artificial intelligence cannot provide a satisfying vision of human life and thought. Intelligence needs to be considered in its natural form, in the very first way that we come to know it: through ourselves and our neighbors, who bear the same Image and Likeness.

To that end, we invited the writers in this issue, “On Natural Intelligence,” to explore these first-order questions. This is not the last time you’ll hear about AI in these pages, but it’s the last time the machine will be the focus of the conversation, or get to define its boundaries. The essays and poems herein offer a multi-layered portrait of natural intelligence as fundamentally embodied, defined by taste and wonder, fostered by curiosity, honed in community, and properly ordered through discipline and humility. They consider how the temptation to become like gods reveals itself in our crowning intellectual achievements—technological advancements and political structures—and why human flourishing must be guided by the transmitted knowledge of the generations that came before us.

We hope that you enjoy this issue and return to it whenever the current discourse makes you wonder what a characteristically human intelligence looks like.

Fare forward,
Michael Carlowicz, Deputy Editor-in-Chief