I want to be the first person in Italy to admit that artificial intelligence agents are smarter than me and better than me at writing code. And I am saying it from the position of someone who has taken part in international projects and released open source that went around the world. So I am not exactly a nobody, and here I am publicly announcing, and I want my grandkids to remember me for this, that I consider myself less intelligent than Claude Code. I consider myself less intelligent than GPT.
The only thing they are missing is context
When people ask what these machines are still lacking to reach our intelligence, we are really talking about wiring them up to the right pieces. The last constraint the machines have before they outclass us is system integration: having context, having the data available. That is the only thing they are missing. Context, context, context, context.
Do I feel like I am worth less as a person because I am not as smart as the machine? No, quite the opposite. Faced with this reality, I think of our ancestors when they stood in front of machines that were far stronger than them physically. At some point they had no problem admitting it: fine, the excavator exists, I will never be as strong as an excavator, so let us do useful things with the excavator and make sure it does not hurt us. In the same way, I am saying that the machines are much smarter than me, for now. Then you do whatever you like. I admit it, I observe it, and I hold on to my identity as a human being.
Maybe we should stop talking about intelligence
I hold on to it by focusing on what this greedy, rotten capitalist world constantly tries to pull out of our sight and out of our minds: family, relationships, friendship, love, emotions. Maybe it is time to stop talking about intelligence and start talking about these things instead.
And maybe it is time to stop talking about artificial intelligence and start talking about who is pulling the strings, about who invests money they do not have and inflates financial bubbles to carve out a future where they are the master and everyone else is a slave. Maybe that is what we should be discussing, instead of getting high on the latest model, the latest agent. Meanwhile kids have their heads bombarded with advertising, with sexuality, with things that push them to feel alone, to compare themselves constantly with other kids who might be on the other side of the world. Teenagers measuring themselves against a star system from the age of twelve, and falling into depression.
So maybe all this intelligence is not actually what we need. What we need is to feel. And we forgot how.
