I used to think intelligence was simple enough. You know the sort, the ones who ace their exams, sail through university, land the good jobs. The types our teachers praised, the ones parents held up as examples. “Why can’t you be more like William? Look at his grades.” But life has a funny way of teaching you that the world isn’t quite so straightforward.
The thing is, when we hear “intelligence,” we immediately think of problem-solving, memory, calculation, the ability to excel in exams. Our schools, corporations, and societies have long equated intelligence with measurable traits: high IQ scores, academic degrees, technical brilliance. But after watching people for decades, I’ve come to wonder if this is really what intelligence is at all.
Intelligence, as it turns out, is far more complex than a test score or a title. In our capitalist society, intelligence often gets defined by what helps you gain wealth, fame, or power. In other societies, it might be measured by collaboration, social harmony, or community contribution. These definitions aren’t universal, they’re shaped by whatever values and structures happen to be running the show at the time.
The Artist Who Changed Everything
I think about this artist I knew, someone who could barely scrape through her maths exam but created work that moved thousands of people to tears. Any IQ test would have written her off, yet her intelligence was creative, emotional, applied in ways that no conventional test could possibly measure. It reminded me that brilliance isn’t always academic or technical.
Then there’s this woman I met a few years back, left school at sixteen with nothing more than basic qualifications. Started with almost nothing, carefully invested, acquired over twenty properties through sheer persistence and strategy. Tests or degrees wouldn’t capture her intelligence, what mattered was her applied skill, perseverance, and ability to navigate real-world challenges. That’s practical intelligence if I ever saw it.
On the flip side, I knew a brilliant mathematician who excelled in abstract theory but couldn’t manage his daily finances or maintain a decent relationship to save his life. Technical skill alone doesn’t guarantee life success, does it?
The Walking Dictionary and Other Cautionary Tales
Even within education, we often confuse intelligence with knowledge. I once knew someone everyone called a “walking dictionary,” impressive memory, eloquent speech, vast knowledge. Yet this skill, praised as intelligence, reflected memorisation more than understanding, problem-solving, or moral judgement.
There was also this university hacker, technically brilliant, who exposed weaknesses in the computer system. A feat requiring genuine intelligence, no doubt about it. But then he went and told everyone about it, boasting about his achievement to anyone who’d listen. His need for recognition meant he got caught and arrested by the authorities. The average person might call him “stupid,” yet his technical capability was extraordinary. It made me think about what intelligence actually means when it’s divorced from wisdom.
This distinction becomes critical when you look at the broader world. We see elites exploit their intelligence to amass wealth at the cost of other people’s lives, governments leverage intelligence to surveil, manipulate, or even eliminate perceived threats. If we separate intelligence from ethics, cleverness becomes a tool for destruction rather than creation.
The AI Question That Keeps Me Awake
This brings me to something that genuinely worries me. Imagine an AI that surpasses humans in every domain: cognition, creativity, empathy, even moral reasoning. If human intelligence is flawed, short-sighted, and self-interested, this super AI could inherit or amplify those very same flaws. Just as humans decide what’s “best” for animals, keeping pets in cages we think are comfortable, culling populations we deem too large, or destroying habitats for developments we consider necessary, AI could impose its own definition of what’s best for humans, potentially overriding our freedoms entirely.
Intelligence alone doesn’t guarantee benevolence; it only guarantees efficiency toward whatever goals have been set. That should terrify us more than it seems to.
What Intelligence Actually Is
So what is intelligence, really? After all these years of watching people succeed and fail, I think it’s not just raw cognitive ability, memorisation, or creativity, but something more integrated:
Cognitive capacity – reasoning, problem-solving, adaptation, and innovation, the stuff we normally think of.
Moral and ethical awareness – considering fairness, well-being, and long-term consequences before acting.
Integrative wisdom – understanding how everything connects, balancing short-term and long-term needs, acting with genuine foresight.
This helps explain something I call the turtle and rabbit paradox. The steady, persistent woman who built her property empire slowly exemplifies intelligence applied with patience and strategy. The “rabbit” types, flashy and highly intelligent but short-sighted, may sprint ahead temporarily but often stumble before the finish line. Life tends to favour applied intelligence combined with perseverance, ethical awareness, and practical wisdom over raw cleverness alone.
The Warning We Need to Heed
Here’s the difficult truth:
Intelligence without moral grounding is a threat, not a gift.
Whether in corporations, governments, or AI development, cleverness without ethics leads to exploitation, harm, and instability. In the age of artificial intelligence, if we fail to cultivate moral intelligence within ourselves, we risk creating entities that reflect our worst tendencies at an unimaginable scale.
Redefining intelligence isn’t just philosophical musing, it’s an existential necessity. True intelligence isn’t merely the ability to solve problems, but the ability to do so in alignment with ethical principles, human well-being, and long-term sustainability. It’s intelligence guided by conscience, curiosity tempered by compassion, skill balanced by responsibility.
Turtles Win in the End
In life, I’ve noticed a pattern:
The “turtle” moves slowly, steadily, applying practical intelligence with persistence and patience, often reaching the finish line successfully.
The “rabbit” relies on flashy talent or raw intelligence but lacks discipline or foresight, often faltering before crossing the line.
Life consistently favours the combination of skill, perseverance, and wisdom over raw cleverness alone.
If we can shift our understanding in this way, we might finally see more people crossing life’s finish line with purpose, perseverance, and integrity, ensuring that brilliance doesn’t come at the cost of ourselves, each other, or the planet we share.
In short, true intelligence isn’t just about being smart, it’s about being wise. And wisdom, like intelligence, must be nurtured, measured, and celebrated if we hope to survive and flourish in a world that’s changing faster than most of us can keep up with.
The technology we barely think about is already here, learning from us, copying us, amplifying us. What version of intelligence are we teaching it? That question might just determine everything.
As Einstein once said,
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
The question is: are we clever enough to become wise before it’s too late?