Could Artificial General Intelligence Be a Myth?
Could Artificial General Intelligence Be a Myth?
Publish Date: 2026-01-29 11:17:00
Source Domain: www.psychologytoday.com
Bear with me for a minute, and let’s consider a counter-narrative. For years and maybe even decades, the future of artificial intelligence (AI) has been framed as a countdown to an inevitable result. At some point, we are told, machines will cross a threshold and become “general” and capable of understanding across domains the way humans do. The moment is often imagined as a kind of cognitive sunrise or epiphany.
This counter-narrative deserves a closer look.
What if that moment never arrives? What if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is not delayed, but conceptually misframed? And, perhaps most curious to me, what if “general intelligence” is not a thing that can exist apart from a living and autobiographical mind?
The Patchwork Mind
We often think of intelligence as if it were a type of cognitive singularity. That’s a convenient construct, but it misses what a human mind actually is. Our mental life is layered, as perception, emotion, memory, language, social inference, and moral intuition are all woven together by a persistent self that carries experience forward through time.
What we call “general intelligence” may already be something of a narrative illusion. It’s not a single, all-purpose cognitive engine but a coherence we impose on a cluster of specialized systems, each with its own logic and constraints. In that sense, the human brain itself is modular.
What makes this modular system feel “general” isn’t the architecture alone but the presence of a self that binds these capacities into one lived story. They belong to the same “someone.” The unity of intelligence, in humans, is not computational. It is autobiographical.
Now, if this is true, then AGI may be a category error in the most basic (and profound) sense—like asking what color the number seven is. The question sounds meaningful, but it confuses things. We’re treating “general intelligence” as if it were a property of information processing, when…
