Get the G out of AGI: Making Room for Environmental Intelligence

Redefining the Philosophical Premises of AI" seeks to reframe the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence in order to shift advanced data-intensive computing from a mechanistic campaign to transcend the conditions and activities of life, toward an ecological model in which computing is necessarily interwoven with and enabling of these.Leonelli's proposed shift toward 'environmental intelligence' (EI) is the only direction of travel for 21stcentury computing that is both sustainable and morally and politically justifiable.Yet it also raises several further questions; chief among them is how to build the bridge from a conceptual and philosophical framing of EI to a material, political, and economic realization of its promise.Bridging that gap will require loosening the dominant AI narrative's growing stranglehold on the imaginations and collective will of both policymakers and wider publics.That narrative, among the many who now uncritically accept it, assumes the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI): an imagined computational force that will naturally supplant human intelligence and render our decision-making and problem-solving abilities mostly superfluous.This premise entails the conclusion that the politically risky, cooperative, and socially reformatory work of building environmental intelligence to secure our living planet's future can be avoided-if policymakers and publics will only invest heavily enough in, and wait patiently for, AGI's arrival.