Smart Enough to Go Extinct? An Evolutionary Challenge to the Value of General Intelligence and Its Ethical Implications for AGI

The pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) rests on a seemingly self-evident premise: that general intelligence, the kind of flexible, domain-general cognitive capacity exemplified by Homo sapiens, is extraordinarily valuable. This paper subjects this premise to critical scrutiny. We first present the intuitive case for the value of general intelligence before mounting an evolutionary challenge. We argue that, on evolutionary timescales, its adaptive value is far from empirically established. Numerous taxa, from cyanobacteria to horseshoe crabs, have persisted for hundreds of millions or even billions of years without anything resembling general intelligence, while Homo sapiens ...

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