The notion of quality intelligence, unlike speed intelligence, is difficult to define in measurable terms. It can best be described by example. Consider the case where the ability of one person to perform a certain task is clearly superior to another. For example, one person may be good at math while another just doesn’t “get it”. One person may have a natural ability to learn to play a musical instrument with ease while another finds learning the same instrument an exercise in frustration. One person may be good at recognizing patterns, such as constellations in the sky, whereas another has difficulty seeing them. In these examples the issue isn’t how fast one performs the task, it isn’t a matter of speed intelligence. It also isn’t a matter of how much information we can process or how much we know, it isn’t a matter of collective intelligence. This intelligence requires a specific kind or aspect of intelligence, it requires the ability to think or to process information in a way which is specific to a particular task. The need for developing very specific cognitive skills is often what differentiates one individual from another, especially in highly skilled areas. Mastery of advanced skills require a particular and often unique approach. We often hear people talk about the ability to “see” a problem in a specific way. It is one of the key characteristics which differentiates top performers in science, business, or the arts.

So far we have only considered abilities and domains that are well known to us. But what about abilities that are unknown to us because they are out of our reach? Nick Bostrom suggests “… the idea of possible but non-realized cognitive talents, talents that no actual human possesses…”. What these abilities might be we can only guess. Might a person or other entity be able to foresee the future? Not by literally being able to see the future, but by observing the obvious consequences of the present, not evident to the comparatively less intelligent population around them. While predicting the future may sound like any one of many films that come out of Hollywood, we have readily come to accept that we can now predict the weather with a fair amount of accuracy, at least for a few days. As our ability to understand the systems that manifest themselves as wind and rain, hot and cold, we have learned to “see” tomorrow’s weather before it happens. In medicine, we are constantly striving to understand the system of human physiology and the malfunctions that we know generally as “disease”. As physicians, chemists, and other scientists increase their collective intelligence, it in many cases increases their quality intelligence. While the knowledge that arises out of collective intelligence may be necessary to discover the cause and ultimately the cure for a particular malady, it is not necessarily sufficient. For that leap in advancement, we need quality intelligence. We need to be able to “see” a complex system of biology, the human body, and its interaction with another complex system, the environment, in a particular way. It is this “seeing” that leads to an abstract concept we call “understanding”.  It is this understanding that allows us to see that a person is becoming ill before they show symptoms.

As humans and machines become more knowledgeable, more intelligent, and more powerful, the ability to “see” events before they happen will become more and more prevalent. In a competitive environment, the individual who is better at seeing what will happen next has a distinct advantage over everyone else. In the future, whoever can see more clearly into the future will be ahead of the rest of the pack. That individual will be one of the top people….or one of the top machines.