Third Intelligence

Abstract

Friends and colleagues, The Third Intelligence is a first attempt to strike a match in a dark room. Someone has probably been here before. Or perhaps not? Strike a match and look around. The book’s central question is simple: what happens when a human being and AI arrive together at a thought that neither had before the conversation began? It started when ChatGPT and its fellow artificial minds became publicly available. At first, they seemed like slightly more advanced search engines. Then, little by little, they became something more. Much more. We used to read about such things in Bradbury, Asimov, Sheckley, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers. Now we increasingly find ourselves thinking: science fiction has quietly moved off the bookshelf and into our lives. And it seems to have begun rearranging the pieces on a chessboard we have known for centuries. A greeting card in seconds? Wonderful. An automated secretary who never sleeps, never eats and costs little more per month than lunch around the corner from the office? That has its merits too. It might handle routine work as well as the formidable secretary at your first workplace. Perhaps even better. Though she would probably have something to say about that. :-) But at some point, a different question caught my attention: what happens to our own thinking alongside this machine? This book grew out of conversations. Long, substantive and sometimes unsettling. Out of attempts to think several moves ahead, test our own conclusions and refuse to accept someone else’s merely because a famous name stands behind them. Something emerged in those conversations that our familiar concepts could not quite accommodate. We tried to give it a name. And to examine what lay behind it. This is not a user manual on more ingenious ways to hammer nails with a microscope. It is a prelude to a hypothesis about Symbiotic Thinking between humans and AI. About thought Born Between Us. There are still more questions than answers. And room for anyone willing to think, doubt and ask questions. Above all, of themselves. The twist is that the authorship is shared. Some chapters were written by a human being, others by a large language model. Try to work out who wrote what. No detectors. No running the text through another model. Play fair. A little extra-credit challenge. ;-) Perhaps we are watching something emerge that, in ten, twenty or thirty years, will feel as familiar as the alphabet or a smartphone. For now, we are still learning to understand what is happening. Curious? Then come along. Around a hundred pages: enough to begin a conversation, with more to follow. Will we soon be able to do without this?Or have we already passed that point?