Since moving to Groningen, one of the first things people ask is: what do you study? I don’t know if it’s the way I dress, the company I keep, or my three decibels too loud conversational tendencies. But when I answer ‘physics’, people are always shocked.
I’ve turned this into a bit of a personal social experiment. I add in silly facts about myself, like how I don’t know my left from my right, or how I can’t do simple addition. No matter how absurd I make it sound that I study physics, regardless of being initially surprised, someone follows up with, ‘Wow, you must be smart.’
Sure, it’s not a horrible thing to hear. But it’s also a little degrading. I’m not suffering through rigorous mathematics just so some rando at a party can say, ‘Hot stuff, you do be a smart turkey.’ What about my passion? My ambition? Reducing it all to ‘being smart’ takes away from the work, the struggle, the growth. And it really got me thinking about how we define intelligence, especially with the buzzword artificial intelligence on everyone’s tongue.
When you finish reading Jane Austen, for your next classic, peruse Jean Piaget’s The Psychology of Intelligence, it’s absolutely thrilling. While AI dazzles with processing, predicting, and imitating human behaviour, Piaget insisted that true intelligence is about action, adaptation, and lived experience. Unlike an algorithm trained on past data, a human mind reshapes itself by stumbling through confusion, failure, and discovery.
I like to think of intelligence as a jungle, not a library. It’s not just rows of facts and aisles of information. Your intelligence is your survival skills – messy, dynamic, fast. The kinds of skills you need in the jungle. Dodging poisonous ants the size of toddlers and boa constrictors whose favourite snack happens to be toddlers. When you’re deep in the jungle, it’s do-or-die. There’s no time to stop and check your citations.
So, if our grey matter is engineered to be flexible, is it counterintuitive to train our intelligence with rigid tools like ChatGPT? The question we should ask ourselves is: Are we nurturing the kind of intelligence Piaget believed in, or are we settling for machines that only mimic it?
At university, it’s easy to mistake intelligence for grades, speed, and efficiency – all things AI excels at. But real thinking is messier. Some kinds of intelligence, like creativity, aren’t just remixing old data; they create what’s never existed. And emotional intelligence depends on lived experience, not pattern recognition.
When someone hears ‘physics’ and immediately says, ‘You must be smart,’ it feels so wrong. Because what I really want them to know is that I am the one you call when we need to wrestle with a boa constrictor.
CARLA ERASMUS