AI and Attorney Woo

Let’s kick things off with a recommendation: go watch the complete first season of Extraordinary Attorney Woo . Then, finish reading this post.

One of my favorite conversations this year was about intelligence, its nature, and (of course) when computers will match or exceed our own intelligence - that is, the rise of Artificial General Intelligence.

During that conversation, I got stuck thinking about what "general" intelligence is. Or rather, I was stuck because I'm not sure it exists as something homogeneously "general" at all.

Complex systems have natural constraints - different parts of the system live in tension, and those tensions must be balanced in some way. In security, it is "confidentiality, availability, integrity"; a computer locked in a vault and never turned on, for instance, embodies very high confidentiality but very low availability.

These tensions exist everywhere. In manufacturing, it is "good, fast, cheap". In blockchains, it is "scalability, security, decentralization". And so on. There is not a deterministic 'right' answer for balancing constraints in a complex system - it is about strategic priorities, risk tolerance, opportunity costs, and other stuff I assume people get MBAs to talk about.

I suspect constructing intelligent systems lends itself to an acute form of this challenge. There are countless constraint dimensions. For example, should an ideal general intelligence be contemplative or decisive in judgement? Pragmatic or principled in planning? Firm or compliant amid change? Efficient or exhaustive in approach? Would it be (if you'll forgive me) an ESTJ, or an INFP? etc.

And I think the answer is: yes. General intelligence probably encompasses the capacity for all those modes - but I don't think it can contain them all in any single agent at one time. That is, I don't think it is possible to express any form of robust general intelligence without first embracing some constraint configuration: without first affirming a predisposition.

I'd argue that it takes a community of intelligences - operating in different modes and balanced against one another in healthy tension - in order to achieve the fullest forms of general intelligence.

Insofar as we embrace that healthy tension and enable diverse expressions of intelligence around us, we upgrade our own and our community's capabilities.

This theme is woven continuously throughout Attorney Woo. There are other reasons to recommend Attorney Woo, like the scriptwriting, the cinematography, the visualizations, and the narrative pacing. But as a lesson in human intelligence, it is (if you'll forgive me again) extraordinary.