What's Changing? - Intelligence

Please see below selected recent intelligence-related change.

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January 2025

The World Economic Forum argued that, for transformation to develop rather than divide society, it must go well beyond technological advances to actually enhance human potential. It is imperative that we develop environmental, social and geopolitical intelligence alongside technological intelligence.

July 2024

People today are much cleverer than they were in previous generations. A study of 72 countries found that average IQs rose by 2.2 points a decade between 1948 and 2020. This change is known as the “Flynn effect” after the scientist who first noticed it. James Flynn was initially baffled by his discovery. It took millions of years for the brain to evolve. How could it improve so rapidly over just a few decades? The answer is largely that people were becoming better nourished and mentally stimulated. Just as muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, so the brain needs the right nutrients and activity to develop. Children today are much less likely to be malnourished than they were in past decades, and more likely to go to school.

March 2024

David Gurteen argued that intelligence can be defined as the ability of an entity to respond beneficially to its environment, ranging from basic responses to complex reasoning. Intelligence encompasses many facets of cognition and behaviour, and dictionaries struggle to capture its multifaceted nature. The AI pioneer Marvin Minsky referred to intelligence as a “suitcase word” packed with multiple meanings. Some may conclude that only humans possess intelligence, while animals, plants, and simple organisms like bacteria lack any real intelligence, yet even simple biological organisms may utilise "intelligence" on at least a rudimentary level to survive.

December 2022

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June 2022

Further reading:

May 2022

Mensa “geniuses” gather annually to test new board games. Members of the world’s oldest high IQ club have previously endorsed Scattergories, Trivial Pursuit, Magic the Gathering, and Taboo.

March 2022

According to developmental psychologist Dr. Howard Gardner, intelligence could mean one of eight things. Of the eight intelligences, only two are measured by IQ tests or other standardised tests. Gardner's eight classifications for intelligence are as follows: linguistic, logical mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.

September 2021

Scientists developed a method that allows quantum computers to peer review each other’s work. Researchers at the University of Vienna said the method could ensure greater confidence in the outputs generated by these computers.

August 2021

The Economist analysed the power of open-source intelligence. New sensors, from dashboard cameras to satellites, are examining the planet and its people as never before. Hobbyists and experts use information from these resources to solve riddles and unearth misdeeds at speed. Satellite imagery is being used to document ethnic cleansing. Photographs are yielding geographical clues that help stop the trafficking of children. Nanosatellites are tracking boats that fish illegally. The decentralised and egalitarian nature of open-source intelligence erodes the power of traditional arbiters of truth and falsehood, in particular of governments and their spies and soldiers.

June 2021

An article in the Financial Times argued that ‘anthropological intelligence’ is a vital and often overlooked tool for solving many of the problems that humans face, from protecting internet users from misinformation to helping software engineers make group decisions. Taking the time to listen deeply and widely to other people, with the diligence and curiosity of an anthropologist studying a remote far-flung community, can help us see beyond the narrow lens of polls and surveys.

March 2021

Emotional intelligence is now widely accepted as a crucial aspect of successful leadership, with emotionally intelligent leaders seen as being better able to provide the kind of psychologically safe environments that encourage the best from their team. Research from Cambridge Judge Business School revealed that emotionally intelligent leaders are also ideal for innovation to flourish. The research, which involved around 15,000 workers, found that supervisors with high levels of emotional intelligence created opportunities for growth among employees, which in turn supported their creativity.

October 2020

Fungi force us to reconsider what intelligence means. It’s an emotive, slippery and in many ways unhelpful word - for many people it is synonymous with sentience or consciousness, while at the same time being notoriously hard to measure even within a given species, let alone to compare across the species divide. Many animal behaviourists prefer instead to speak of cognition: the neural processes that govern behaviour. But that generally assumes a brain, or at least a nervous system. Plants and fungi have neither. What they do share in common with us and other “higher” animals is a system of branching filaments that act as conduits for signals of some kind - signals that put cells and tissues here in touch with those there.

June 2020

Economic growth will also depend heavily on the speed at which we can find a vaccine, manufacture it at scale and make it globally accessible. The World Health Organisation initiative to ensure worldwide sharing of all Covid-19-related knowledge, data and technologies by making a pool of Covid-19 patent licences freely available to all countries is a great move in this direction. The virus can only be defeated with truly collective intelligence, economist Mariana Mazzucato told the Financial Times.

May 2019

Society prizes intelligence. Geniuses are often viewed with awe and assumed to be guaranteed prosperity and success. Yet there is a dark side to intelligence. Many gifted children's childhood can often be unhappy. For example, Mensa is an international organisation founded in Britain in 1946 to nurture the country’s most intelligent people. However when an Economist reporter put out a request via Mensa to hear from gifted children and their parents, her inbox filled with emails, many of them anguished

August 2018

Society rewards intelligence, and think it right that the smartest get ahead. Is it fair to assume that intelligence deserves reward and is it right to build a society to favour an educated elite, asked the Institute for Ideas? Empires from Rome to the Mongols were built on other qualities, such as physical courage and strength. Should recognise this as prejudice, or is discrimination based on academic merit vital to society?
Recent research has reportedly shown that an individual’s genetic makeup largely determines their intelligence. Drawing on that, and considering how other extrapersonal factors contribute to academic achievement, Quartz argued that we should stop lauding “A” grades only and start appreciating other, more truly meritocratic values.
Air pollution causes a “huge” reduction in intelligence, according to new research, indicating that the damage to society of toxic air is far deeper than the well-known impacts on physical health. The research was conducted in China but is relevant across the world, with 95% of the global population breathing unsafe air. It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education.

July 2018

A sharp move to the consumption of news selected by algorithm on social media and the widespread use of ad-blocking are putting severe pressure on the business models of traditional publishers and new digital outlets, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The good news for the old media is it is still producing far more of the heavyweight news stories read by the online audience, however users notice the original news brand behind social media content less than half of the time.
Business users are adopting embedded analytics double the number of times traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools, according to the results of a new study from self-service analytics firm Logi Analytics. The fourth annual State of Embedded Analytics Report found that 43% of application users leverage embedded analytics regularly, as it continues to improve user satisfaction and increase end-user adoption.
In 'Turn Data Monotony Into Data Mastery: Cultivate An Insights-Driven Culture', Forrester noted that employees worldwide constantly engage with data, and they perceive it to be central to their daily work. Their companies urgently execute on data-driven strategies in a race for better and faster results. However, certain obstacles prevent individuals - at the top and bottom of the organisation - from eliciting trustworthy, actionable insight.
What is the relationship between money and psychology? What is the secret to happiness? What is the meaning of life? These are the kinds of deep questions TED Talks have long been exploring. Now, with the help of IBM's cognitive computer Watson, the answers may be just a click away. Watson does not just follow commands but learns over time,; it has ingested about 2,000 TED talks and organised them based on the content of the lectures. It maps out talks by topics and insights about the speakers, allowing users to easily browse the vast TED archives. It also lets users ask Watson any question they can dream up. Within seconds, they receive an answer in the form of relevant clips from the talks.
Many organisations include the phrase “forward thinking” in their core values or vision statements, but few have a formalised process for this practice. strategy+business believes that in in the innovation space, forward thinking is more than a generic phrase: it refers to organisations and the way in which they proactively look toward the future to identify opportunities, and it offers some specific tactics that can help companies capitalise on future trends.
Predicting the future need not be a stab in the dark, argued Grant Thornton. There are plenty of practical steps businesses can take to prepare for the challenges ahead. A good starting point is to have a clear understanding of your organisation’s vision, strategy, strengths and weaknesses, according to Dean van Leeuwen, futurist, keynote speaker and co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, an international consultancy that helps businesses effectively plan for the future.
In 'Why Your Company Needs a Resident Futurist', INSEAD argued that being far-sighted about your strategy can help you prepare for the big global changes already unfolding. As a first step, companies should at least be starting conversations around this question and searching for the megatrends most applicable to them.
In 'How collective intelligence helps organisations move past hierarchical leadership structures', Capgemini suggested that, if we could amplify our intelligence beyond the capability of any individual on our team, we might be able to make better decisions and predictions, estimations and forecasts.
Business intelligence continues to be one of the fastest-moving areas in the enterprise. And not only is the technology moving fast, but the techniques people are using to drive adoption and get value from their data are multiplying. Among these trends are an increasing appetite for more advanced analytics to answer deeper questions, and new approaches emerging for governance of self-service BI. The potential for innovation is far from over. A new Tableau paper highlighted the top trends in business intelligence for 2016.
What stands out now reading "Future Stuff" - and this is common in futurology - is how under-optimistic it was. The book predicts, for example, a series of innovations — pocket computer, weather forecaster, watch pager, personal betting machine, handheld sports monitor, portable voice translator and video telephone among them — all of which now exist in one device, the smartphone.
In 20/20 Foresight, strategy+business argued that many business leaders need to improve their perceptual acuity and explained how to develop the ability to look around corners and become a catalyst for change,
A new book, Strategic Intelligence, draws on decades of experience to argue that, today, leaders require a multi-faceted “strategic intelligence” to succeed in managing change. Four “conceptual tools” form the core of this strategic intelligence: foresight; visioning; partnering; and engaging, motivating and empowering. Leaders need a philosophy to bind these capabilities together, and also profound knowledge of their chosen field. Leadership is thus a task requiring both head and heart.
Competitive intelligence may have a bit of a cloak and dagger reputation, conjuring up images of secretive sleuthing. But Ellen Naylor makes a strong argument that "cooperative intelligence" - that is, voluntarily sharing information with others in our increasingly connected digital world - may yield better results for customers and companies in the end.

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