“There are at least two common senses of the word “intelligence” where I detect the incursion of what I take to be dangerous distortions of a crucial idea or concept.

The first is in the phrase “the intelligence community”; a vague delineation of a vast array of military-political organizations whose purposes range from surveillance, data-gathering, analysis and prediction to authorizing the use of force or as a stand-in for the justification of large-scale violence.

The second is in the phrase “artificial intelligence”; an abject misnomer applied to a vast array of algorithmic computational processes in a public-relations scheme that seeks to equate intelligence with the activities of machines.

The primary reason I find these senses of the word concerning is that intelligence is a holophore — a special class of terms whose definitions are almost universally inherited by other related and seemingly unrelated phenomenon.

When we adopt new meanings for holophores, all meanings inherit aspects of these transformations — often in ways that lead to the opposite of intelligence, and, in many cases nourish processes that inflate the hubris of factions within our societies whose agendas and activities are diametrically opposed to survivable senses of this term.

When I think of intelligence, I think of living beings comprising relational hypersystems whose complexity abjectly defies these senses of the word. These are the activities that gave birth to the possibility of human intelligence… a possibility that is as rarely embodied as it is popularly asserted.”

— an intelligence agent