intelligence-radar/compendium/00-what-this-is.md

Imported exploration, 2026-09-13. Source claims have not been independently verified by this repository. See integration review.

Compendium — what this is

Version 0.1 · 13 September 2026

This folder is the introductory map Intelligence Radar keeps of how humans currently model intelligence. It is meant to improve over time: weekly digests propose edits; accepted edits bump the version and leave a short changelog.

It is not a complete literature review. It is a working ontology plus the disputes that matter for monitoring the frontier.

Scope of “intelligence” here

Intelligence Radar tracks four overlapping objects:

1. Biological intelligence — nervous systems and the cognitive capacities they support in humans and other animals.
2. Artificial intelligence — engineered systems that perform cognitive work, currently dominated by large trained models and agent scaffolds.
3. Collective / institutional intelligence — markets, science, firms, states, open-source communities: systems that know and decide without a single mind.
4. Otherwise generated — hybrid human–machine systems, in-silico cognitive science, digital twins of brains, proposed non-neural substrates (quantum, analog, neuromorphic, latent-space recurrent architectures).

The facility’s special focus is the capability frontier of artificial systems and the price and availability of those capabilities. The other three objects exist so the frontier is not mistaken for the whole phenomenon.

What “humanity knows”

A useful humility: humanity does not have one settled theory of intelligence. It has:

• Measurement traditions (psychometrics, animal cognition batteries, AI benchmarks, economic productivity studies).
• Mechanistic sketches (predictive processing, global workspace, network neuroscience, scaling laws, Bayesian program learning).
• Engineering recipes that work without a complete theory (pretrain–reason–act loops, RL from verifiable rewards, tool use, long-horizon agents).
• Open disputes that are load-bearing for policy and investment (is general intelligence a real factor? is consciousness computational? do current agents generalize or memorize? is the bottleneck data, compute, architecture, or evaluation?).

The compendium tracks those four layers separately so a new model release does not get written up as a new theory of mind.

Reading order

1. 01-maps-of-intelligence.md — the main human models
2. 02-measurement.md — how intelligence is scored
3. 03-frontier-as-of-2026-09.md — snapshot of the artificial frontier
4. Changelog at the bottom of each file