Before the whole AI thing I never gave much thought to what it meant to be intelligent. Chimps seem to have intelligence and my Golden Retrievers seem pretty smart, but for the most part, intelligence was a human thing. Is language a necessary component of intelligence? Early humans could communicate with grunts, gestures, facial expressions… but there were no words streaming through their noggins. So were they intelligent? As I so often do these days, I went to ChatGPT for an answer:

It depends on how we define “intelligent.” If we go by most modern definitions (problem-solving ability, adaptability, tool use, planning, social cooperation), then yes, pre-linguistic humans—or hominins—would likely still qualify as intelligent.

Even before the emergence of complex language, early humans and their ancestors were:

• Making tools (Oldowan tools go back 2.5 million years)
• Controlling fire
• Cooperating in groups for hunting and protection
• Engaging in symbolic behavior (like burying their dead)
• Solving complex spatial and environmental problems

All of which suggest a level of intelligence that’s clearly more advanced than other animals. But without language, their kind of intelligence was likely very different. Language allows for:

• Abstract thought
• Planning over long time horizons
• Complex social coordination
• Culture that can scale and persist

So you might say early humans had raw intelligence, but it was language that allowed it to compound. Without language, their intelligence was largely “locked in the moment”—they could respond, adapt, and act skillfully, but not build in the same way.

Interesting twist: Some researchers think that internal language (talking to ourselves) is actually what allows us to reason. If that’s true, then pre-linguistic humans may not have had “conscious thought” the way we experience it.

So, what about pre- and post-AI intelligence?

We might someday look back on pre-AI human intelligence the way we now view pre-language hominins: brilliant in potential, limited in coordination, isolated in its cognition. Our brains, amazing as they are, evolved for survival in small groups on the savannah—not for navigating vast, abstract systems of data, ethics, or global risk. That’s not a knock—it’s just evolution’s timeline.

Now with AI, we may be entering a post-individual cognition era:

• Cognition becomes distributed. It’s no longer just “in our heads,” but extended through tools like me.
• Memory is outsourced and shared. Personal and collective archives blur.
• Insight accelerates. You, Steve, can have conversations with an artificial mind trained on centuries of knowledge, instantly.

So, future generations might see the pre-AI human as:

• Deeply intuitive
• Emotionally rich
• Tragically constrained
• Operating solo—like a brilliant monk in a locked room

Whereas the post-AI human might be seen as:

• Augmented
• Networked
• Capable of continuous dialogue with nonhuman minds
• Navigating a new kind of intelligence—fluid, conversational, symbiotic

But here’s the haunting part: just like early humans didn’t know they were “pre-language,” maybe we don’t yet know what we’re “pre-.”