“The ambition of our initiative is to mobilise a cognitive power that we are referring to as ‘extraordinary intelligence’. As many of you – participants of the project – have been pointing out, this ambition tends to evoke considerable attraction and equally considerable resentment, or at least reservation. The objections are partly ethical and political, partly cultural and psychological. When critiqued conceptually, the phrasing also calls for a serious re-visiting of the notion of intelligence. The ‘extraordinary’ we are after turns out to be less problematic:
the way we put it, it is a progressive, dynamic term. ‘Extraordinary’ does not come to mean ‘greater than’, along a pre-established scale of measurement or relative to a baseline in a population, but rather ‘greater again, and yet again’, displaying qualities that outgrow themselves. The extraordinary intelligence would then be a capability that continuously exceeds its own limits, proving to be more insightful, more far-sighted and more potent than one might normally project. But what is ‘intelligence’? Clearly, we cannot be referring here to what is captured by IQ tests. The intelligence quotient is an iconic psychometric construct and the primary feature of such measurement methods is their reliable reference to traits that are persistent – ideally throughout the lifetime of the individuals assessed. If our interest is in an ever-changing, ever-growing intelligence, we cannot be applying a measure that by its very definition seeks to trace an invariant.”