When modern computer scientists define artificial intelligence as mere optimization, they quietly adopt David Hume's eighteenth-century argument that reason is strictly a servant of desire. In this view, famously summarized by Hume, reason can calculate the best means to reach a goal, but it can never judge whether that goal is actually worth wanting. Contemporary language models fit this definition well, operating entirely within reward functions and feedback loops supplied from the outside. But treating this engineering model as a complete description of human intelligence mistakes a tool for the whole mind.
Immanuel Kant argued against this reduction, insisting that reason also has the power to assess and revise our ends rather than just serving them. When we let optimization metrics define human intelligence, we risk reducing our own capacity for moral judgment to simple calculation. It is a useful reminder that our current fascination with machine capability often smuggles in a very narrow, historically contingent view of what people actually are.
more: https://aeon.co/essays/why-real-intelligence-is-something-more-than-optimisation
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