Human beings have always taken their own minds as the reference point for what intelligence is and what intelligence ought to be. For centuries we have praised the abilities that separate the “clever” from the “stupid”: mathematics, literature, abstract reasoning, the mastery of symbolic systems. These have become the gold standards, the abilities through which we judge ourselves and each other.
Meanwhile the abilities shared by all humans are taken entirely for granted, no matter how astonishing they are in absolute terms. Coordinated movement; real-time visual processing; the intricate control needed to wash a plate without dropping it; the intuitive physics needed to carry a newborn child; the effortless parsing of faces, body language and intention. These feats are rarely honoured. They feel too ordinary, too universal, too familiar to be considered part of “intelligence”.
And at the same time, the tasks that lie outside human reach altogether – such as mentally generating the next number in a pseudorandom sequence, or maintaining perfect attention for hours – are quietly excluded from the definition of intelligence. They do not count. They are simply “off-limits”, as though the word itself could not stretch to include anything humans cannot do.
There is a word for this: parochialism.
Humanity’s entire conception of intelligence is shaped by what happens to fall inside the human cognitive comfort zone. We celebrate the skills that allow some of us to stand above others. We ignore the skills we all share. And we write off the skills we lack as fundamentally irrelevant.
This creates a comforting illusion: that the highest forms of intelligence are the ones humans already possess, and the limits of intelligence lie very close to our own.
Nothing in biology suggests that human intelligence is close to any universal upper bound. In fact, the structure of our mind gives the opposite impression.
The tasks humans find effortless – balancing, grasping, navigating dynamic environments, understanding speech in noisy settings – are deeply complex from an engineering perspective. They require massively parallel processing, continuous feedback loops, and millisecond-scale adjustments. Evolution gave us these abilities because our survival depended on them.
By contrast, the abilities we call “higher cognition” are recent evolutionary improvisations layered on top of older systems. Symbolic reasoning, algebra, formal logic and translation all piggyback on neural machinery that was never designed for abstraction. We admire these tasks precisely because they do not come naturally.
In this way, human intuition creates a distorted map of difficulty. What feels easy is assumed to be simple. What feels difficult is assumed to be profound. But these feelings reflect evolutionary history, not the intrinsic structure of the tasks themselves.
Modern AI has begun to expose this parochial map.
Machines excel at what humans call “hard”: manipulating symbols at scale, spotting patterns in vast datasets, performing precise calculations without fatigue. These are the tasks that align with the discrete, systematic, serial nature of computation.
Machines struggle at what humans call “easy”: folding laundry, loading a dishwasher, identifying a cup in poor lighting, grasping an object that might be slippery, fragile or irregular. These tasks require a fluid, embodied intelligence that evolution refined for millions of years.
This inversion is not a commentary on machines. It is a commentary on us.
Our minds evolved for physical survival, not for chess or poetry. What feels effortless does so because evolution pre-installed the necessary heuristics. What feels difficult does so because evolution never built the required structures.
If humanity continues to treat its own cognitive profile as the universal template for intelligence, we will misunderstand both ourselves and the systems we are creating.
We will overestimate our strengths. We will underestimate our limitations. And we will misinterpret the abilities of machines that think very differently from us.
The coming decades require a more honest understanding of the human mind: one that recognises its brilliance without exaggerating its scope; one that acknowledges both our evolutionary gifts and our evolutionary constraints.
The human mind is remarkable. But it is remarkable in the way that a finely tuned biological instrument is remarkable: specialised, powerful within a certain domain, and bounded by the pressures that shaped it.
To navigate the future wisely, we must let go of the comforting idea that human intelligence is the pinnacle of cognition. It is not. It is one peak among many, shaped by local conditions, impressive in its own right, but only a small part of a much broader landscape.
If we can recognise this – if we can move beyond our parochialism – then we can begin to understand what is coming, and to design a future in which our strengths are used well rather than defended blindly.
The first step is simple, and difficult: to accept that the human mind is not the measure of all things.
It is only the measure of us.