Intelligence or memory?

We understand that intelligence is one thing and memory is another. Looking in the dictionary (Portuguese language, Aulete 2011), it seems that we are right. So, this so-called AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a semantic mistake or a clumsy translation. It would be better to call it IA (Intelligent Automatism) or IC (Intelligent Computing). Having said that, in this text, we will adopt the acronym AI to designate the branch of cybernetics that tries to emulate human reasoning.

With due respect to the doctors of the psyche, what is understood by “human reasoning” involves some areas, about which there does not seem to be consensus. However, it seems peaceful that, in our language, “intelligence” is one thing and “memory” is another.

“Memory” is knowing, remembering, memorizing, repeating, knowing. Memory is the database, the reference library, the archive, the encyclopedia. An indispensable aid in the analysis of alternatives, in the prediction and comparison of results, whether by successive approximations or by other mathematical methods. Certainly to “épater les bourgeois” (*1), now under the umbrella of the still sophisticated magic word “algorithms”, that is, polynomial formulas, systems of equations, numerical methods.

As a colleague who has been in the field for 57 years says:

“when technology advances quickly and the market does not want to be left behind, nomenclature does not follow the vernacular but rather sales. The one that sells more is the one that ‘sticks’. This AI is one case. I heard it for the first time at Stanford, in 1972. People end up repeating it because they do not quite understand what they are saying nor doing. Or because it sounds nice to those who approve resources ‘That is Money’. More than half a century later, there is no reason for the market to change the sedimented terms”.

Even if incorrect. A pity for those who want to understand and do. Comfortable for those who are satisfied with following those who understand. And those who pay.

“Intelligence” is the creativity and curiosity that instigates novelties. It is deciding what to do, why to do it, how to do it, when to do it and who is going to do it. It is an art and a skill.

There is also “experience”, so disdained lately, which avoids the repetition of errors, the wasting of time, and helps to see questions that the inexperienced do not see. Conventions, contracts, laws, memorials, fall into the drawer of records and precautions to avoid misunderstandings, which experience recommends doing.

“Experience” is perhaps a branch of memory with creativity. In engineering, people have always joked about the difference between an “old engineer” and an “engineer old in age”. The old engineer is already formed that way and, at the end of his career, is an “old old engineer”. It applies to any profession.

Confusing memory with intelligence is not intelligent. The “memorizers” of schools create a group of people, called CDFs, who rarely stand out in real life.

When the Brazilian Mequinho (1972?) won a grandmaster chess title, the local plebs, for lack of other reasons, became proud. The Chamber of Deputies, in Brasília, even voted on a law to include mandatory chess classes in schools, on the assumption that it would help develop intelligence (who remembers this?).

Many supported it or remained silent, until a lucid person said: “Yes, this will help develop that type of reasoning that leads people to play chess” (it was the famous and brilliant Millôr Fernandes, humorist, playwright and journalist). The Senate, faced with the ridicule exposed by irony, did not approve the law, and the subject was never touched again.

Fortunately. Today, computer programs win all chess games.

Answering questions that have already been asked and finding answers that are out there, because someone already knew how to answer them, is easy. What should matter are the new questions that must be asked. And analyzing the answers critically. That is, besides “knowledge” (which a good database solves), in order to evolve, we need experience, intelligence and curiosity, something inherent to few humans.

Computing has made database queries faster. This changes many things. But this is not intelligence. If we do not understand what we are discussing, there will be no solution.

In many countries, the generation that is entering the education system receives classes from teachers who are not quite understanding what they should do and who do not quite know what to ask. This is because, in the last 50 years, few teachers have had contact with the labor market. They enclosed themselves in teaching jobs and in the criteria for career advancement implemented in universities.

How will the new generation know what to ask computers if their teachers think that setting up a more user-friendly and faster software to access a database is an end in itself? If they think that the answer is only one. That it will not change with time, that it will not be handled by disputes for power or by mistake or by mere vandalism (hackers)! They forget that having too much information is almost the same as having no information. They forget that things are relative, that being “on the side of good” or being “on the side of evil” can vary from culture to culture, from time to time, from belief to belief, from “cause” to “cause”. This “perception” is in intelligence.

Education has underdeveloped itself and is lost in “kicking and screaming”. It creates themes such as “complexity engineering”, without realizing the semantic emptiness embedded in it. How to know how to formulate the correct question?

Someone once said that everything is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. He was and is absolutely right. Perspiration was never a problem, 90% of the population is able to do it but, for some time now, computing (now called “AI”) has made it much easier and has occupied a good part of the place of perspiration. What to do with the surplus of people no longer necessary? This is a serious side effect.

The answer seems to be to occupy them with leisure and related services. With art, with sports, with playful things.

Knowing how to decide what to do, why to do it, how to do it, when to do it and who is going to do it is an art and a skill; it is Intelligence, where curiosity and creativity reside, which instigate novelties.

Even ambition, which is also part of human nature, but was supplied primarily by force, by violence, by numbers, by intuition, by instinct, came to be served by AI, with the differential of innovations, that is, by intelligence. Fights became those of drones, biochemical weapons, laser beams. Brilliant and terrible.

What will be achieved with the evolution of computing, of databases, will be (if it is not already) within everyone’s reach, for a very low price.

Intelligence, and the perception of things, is inherent to a human elite. This elite will undergo rotation, because intelligence does not seem to be hereditary. The structures, the cultures that best adapt to this rotation, will prevail.

The ability to remember, to know, to memorize, or whatever name one wants to give it, will be worth less and less and will be common to all. More to some than to others, because databases are being concentrated in few hands.

Real intelligence, curiosity and knowing how to ask questions, few know and few will know how to do. They will dominate the world. Perhaps it has always been this way, but it has never been so clear.

(*1) - “épater les bourgeois”, French idiomatic expression, used worldwide in the last century (“to astonish the bourgeois”).

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # written between Dec 2025 and Jan 2026, R2026 Mar Ri, 7,267 characters.