President Donald Trump frequently uses IQ as an insult or compliment, especially in discussions on technology. But a Canadian historian has argued that the push for the United States' dominance in artificial intelligence could render traditional notions of IQ meaningless if their economic vision is achieved.
In an article published in the Guardian on Monday, historian Quinn Slobodionn wrote that Trump and his Silicon Valley partners are "obsessed" with IQ.
"Being a 'low-IQ individual' is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being 'high-IQ' is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right. Yet in the drive for US supremacy in artificial intelligence – signalled by the $500bn (£375bn) Stargate project announcement in the White House and an executive order to integrate AI into public education, beginning in kindergarten – there is a hidden irony," he wrote.
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Slobodionn argued, "If their vision for our economic future is realised, IQ in the sense that they value will lose its meaning."
Slobodionn noted that IQ testing arose at a time when the U.S. and other industrialised nations were worried about the health of their populations.
"Recruitment campaigns for the Boer war in the UK, and then the first world war elsewhere, showed male populations that were unhealthier than their fathers’ generation," he wrote. "Industrial work seemed to be triggering what looked like a process of degeneration, with a fearful endpoint in the subterranean Morlocks of HG Wells’s classic novella, The Time Machine."
The author noted that the significance of IQ as a measure of educational outcomes in the U.S. increased during the shift to an information economy in the 1980s and 90s. This surge in interest, he argued, was influenced by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial book, The Bell Curve.
"The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called 'living with inequality'," he wrote.