PRIMAL INTELLIGENCE by Angus Fletcher: Why US generals always outwit AI in war games

THE modern world,’ according to American a c a d e m i c A n g u s Fletcher in this innovative book, ‘has incorrectly defined intelligence.’

We’ve assumed the brain functions much like a computer. Yet, a computer today will always do better than humans in tasks which demand nothing but logic. ‘By drilling students to think like computers,’ Fletcher writes, the educational system ‘is training them to do what their laptops can do better.’

Fletcher champions a different way of using our brains. The human brain has ‘non-logical intelligence’. We think ‘in story’. Narrative is at the heart of our cleverness but we are in danger of losing sight of this kind of brain power. As a professor of ‘story science’ at The Ohio State University’s Project Narrative, he is an eloquent advocate of an intelligence that AI can’t replicate.

This ‘primal intelligence’ has four strands to it – intuition, imagination, emotion and common sense. Computers possess none of these qualities. Common sense, for example, is an ‘ability that distinguishes humans from AI which can ace complex calculations yet fumble a decision obvious to children’.

Why do chatbots such as ChatGPT come up with false information? Unlike humans, they don’t have the common sense to know when they don’t know something. So, in Fletcher’s words, ‘they fabricate guilelessly, filling the gap in their knowledge by extrapolating from past trends’. Unfortunately, the result is often nonsense. AI and computers are brilliant as long as only maths and logic are needed. If ‘life requires common sense or imagination, AI tumbles off its throne’.

This is brought home to Fletcher when he visits a site near the Pentagon which has a computer programmed with military intelligence. It has memorised the strategies of history’s greatest generals and can make a billion decisions a second. Yet it always loses war games against the US army’s human teams. The reason? It has no initiative. As the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz saw, the best plans are not logical, because logical plans are ‘predictable’.

By contrast, the exemplar of the qualities that make up our ‘story-thinking intelligence’ is Shakespeare. ‘Shakespeare binds together the book you’ve been reading,’ Fletcher writes. He even provides a list of people who, he believes, developed their own primal intelligence by reading Shakespeare.

They include Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Nikola Tesla, Maya Angelou and Vincent van Gogh. This is essentially a self-help book, and as Fletcher notes in his introduction, his aim is not just to propose a theory about the human brain but to demonstrate ways in which readers can be trained to improve their own primal intelligence. He certainly goes a long way towards showing that ‘the human brain is real-life smart because it thinks in story’.