Intelligence Does Not Live in the Model

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The anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, himself an experienced sailor and navigator, spent many weeks on the bridge of a large US Navy ship watching how the crew plotted its course. In 1995 he published a book about it, Cognition in the Wild, and its main conclusion will seem strange to anyone used to thinking that the mind is located in the head. On the ship there is not a single person whose head holds everything needed for safe navigation. One sailor takes a bearing on a lighthouse, another writes the figures in the log, a third plots them on the chart, the navigator checks, the captain decides, and between them stand instruments, rulers, tables and procedures refined over centuries. The navigation is performed by this whole ensemble together, and if you ask where on the ship the knowledge of where it is going resides, the answer is: nowhere separately and everywhere together.

For comparison Hutchins described the Micronesian navigators who crossed hundreds of kilometres of open ocean without charts or compass, by the stars, the waves and the flight of birds. There almost everything needed for navigation fitted into the head of one person, who had been learning it since childhood. Both systems brought the vessel to its destination, but they were built entirely differently, and comparing a warship’s navigator with a Micronesian seafarer on intelligence alone would be meaningless.

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Today artificial intelligence is talked about as if all the intelligence lived in the model. A new one comes out, it is compared with the old one, tables are published in which one solves three percent more problems, and people argue about which is smarter. The argument has some point, about as much as an argument over which sailor on the bridge has the best eyesight.