Accelerating Intelligence by Scott Hadley Morgan

An impassioned manifesto on human creativity, intelligence, and ambition

Intelligence isn’t just about retaining facts. In this ambitious, deeply thought-provoking work, author Scott Hadley Morgan divulges that it’s about observation, art, expanding the mind, and using the tools at your disposal without overusing them.

Accelerating Intelligence is an expansive book on the nature of intelligence. Morgan leaves no stone unturned, especially in regards to art and artificial intelligence (AI). Sure, AI models of the twenty-first century are equipped with the knowledge circulating the internet, but it’s the human element that truly transcends understanding, especially through art and lived experience.

Morgan, a director and screenwriter, asks us to deconstruct the “human agreements”—the conventions that shape how we understand reality—and to expand our minds with curiosity and emotion, those feelings unattainable by artificial intelligence.

Where Morgan thrives is in his discussions on the importance of consuming and creating art. There is no art without humans. Morgan states: As the only beings on earth capable of creating something out of nothing—no matter the medium—we must engage our cognitive minds with creativity and observation as often as we can. We must read, we must write; we must create, we must analyze. “You cannot install genius or innovation like a software—you need to ignite the recipe and let it nurture and boil over with unknown consequences…”

To Morgan, art is the unexplainable. Those ideas that couldn’t be put into words but must be consumed anyway, in whichever way they’re presented. These ideas are embedded in our nature and must be shared in order for us all to truly accelerate our intelligence. “Art comes from the part of the brain that tells us who we are.” It requires balance, study, and real human life.

Accelerating Intelligence also dives into the dangers and pitfalls of social media and the internet at large. Morgan’s passion for the subject of growth and intelligence shines on every page. He’s critical of what we’re shown—and rightly—but also conscious of the good that can come with connecting every human on the planet. But “meeting only like-minded people,” like these apps are prone to encourage, “will prove harmful to a healthy society, cultural appreciation, relationships to history, [and] what we know in our bones is truth.” I challenge you to read this book and not feel emboldened to create your own art, to challenge your own assumptions, and to get out into the big wide world.

However, the book comes with some hefty pitfalls as well. Morgan is often multiple steps ahead of us and even ahead of himself, making some sentences and paragraphs meander into different subjects and pull up short on complete understanding. There is often too much going on at once, which takes these strong singular ideas and morphs them into something too sprawling to fully comprehend.

There are also a number of criticisms of various people that could prove unwelcoming to those reading it. Certain occupations, like economists, take jabs while neurodivergent readers are lumped into categories and given superhuman abilities. There are also ideas of multiverses that aren’t fully explained, despite plenty of language aiming to do so, and it ultimately leads readers to move on without finalized theories of how it works.

Accelerating Intelligence is nothing short of bold. It’s a provocative study on all things cognitive science and speculation. Morgan is a voice to be reckoned with, and those willing to look outside themselves will be better for it. Question everything you thought you knew with this tome of intellectual stimulation.