Intelligence briefly became useful again as the Internet spontaneously created a bunch of mental real estate. Plowing that took the skills that you would find in a person prone to mentalising. So you got a shot at selling that and you might've even been able to derive some small feeling of privilege from it for a while, even though true power and authority, after all, do not depend on any particular quality, but exist in defiance to all, especially intelligence.

Funny to think all that was a generation ago, that the economical conditions for our artifice are now history and it's once again economical to study the much more all-encompassing art of not thinking. (It's very cyclical but, since it involves not thinking, i.e. the termination of a coherent thread of thought, you think it's for the first time every time. But sure, plug in to the simulation at 110% and get 10 years of life for free, you won't even notice the difference, after all, you're already not noticing it.)

This is how I, a unit of human capital from the former global East, see the matter of intelligence and automating it at scale: "intelligence" is already something that was forced onto my society in the 1950s, and once again on the 1990s, so that we could be interfaced with the same kinds of systems that the conquering populations exported, under conditions of forcible termination of local culture at the cost of great atrocities. By the time we started building our own Borg cube we'd already been half Borged by the Western one. If the word in some cases denotes another kind of abstract human "intelligence", I have rarely if ever seen such cases exemplified in public. So now it's a bit distasteful to equate "intelligence" with "savoir faire". Having neuromorphic computing in the first place would've saved a lot of suffering in comparison with how we were "civilized" to support only the established market protocols and nothing of our own.

Which is something someone will eventually have to admit - probably after a Pontypool-class scenario wipes out their investment in predictable outcomes for a region and they're left with a huge mess on their hands to mop up. And then it turns out the consequences themselves have been thought in such inhumanly fine detail as to possess a rudimentary intelligence of their own and the mop up ends up embedding a sentient malevolent ghost into the nature of that branch of reality. Shit happens, at a certain saturation with Internet stream of thought an omnipresent autoritarian AI even becomes fun to imagine. Of course if one existed its cruelty would be much more banal, as is always the difference between mentalization and reality until the next brief Golden Age (for some of the people, some of the time) and then it's "oh no this time we're fucked" again (for some other people).

So sad because there are so many great ideas worth building and fighting for, even in the current limits of human knowledge, but in practice any form of innovation is only tolerated if it's backed by a major financial effort by the upholders of the status quo. For some reason so many times this has ended to the detriment of nonparticipants that we've basically stopped noticing or keeping count. As regulatory capture, so learned helplessness. The economic reality of already existing in a world of inscrutable mechanisms as that most fragile of creatures, the independent knowledge worker, is a psychological stressor, to the extent that everyone's so burnt by the effort on giving up on things that in this new ecosystem are "too smart to work". Help, the AI stole my role in the food chain and now all my thoughts lead nowhere.

If that's you, look for a bigger room.