You’re right. “Claude Code is AGI” is a meme. It’s not true. It’s not even specified enough to be true: AGI is a floating signifier, people redefine it to whatever they need for their argument.
It’s useful to think about though, not because Claude feels like a perfect human replacement — at the edges of the distribution it obviously is either sub- or superhuman, and rarely in a way you would expect — but because it fulfills the economic function of a human, which is to use the computer.
Now don’t get me wrong, I understand manual labor. I’ve worked construction, I’ve done logging, I’ve been a migrant farmhand. I’ve also run a small business and been an artist and musician in various lives. I know that not everything in life can be done on the computer!
But it will be.
You see, intelligence itself is computational. The idea of “AGI” comes from an intuition that W what matters is you, the person. A unitary intelligence in a single organism. Something that can go to the all same environments as, and can perform the mental and physical tasks of, an average human.
Obviously some of our human skills are individuated like this. I can climb a tree and pick a fruit by myself. I guess I could dig a hole with a rock but to dig a hole with a stick I would need a tree which is a whole other form of life with its own intelligent properties. and to do anything interesting, even catch a rabbit, I need another human to cooperate with me.
Take an ecological, cybernetic view instead: intelligence is a interlocking system of composable functions. There is intelligence in the cell turning DNA code into proteins and tissues. There is intelligence in the multi-species game of evolution. There’s intelligence in the organism when it seeks better circumstances by modeling its environment and taking actions in a loop, and there is intelligence in the habitats, structures, languages and relations between organisms and species.
There is already some intelligence in the planetary technoindustrial system. You feel this when packages arrive at your house, the eerie unseen entity that predicted and influenced your individual desire. Santa Claus is real, he’s just an algorithm. And it’s always watching. And it’s making a list.
This is not to say Oh everything’s intelligent pantheism woo AGI is whatever I want!
On the contrary: if we unbundle the idea of intelligence from the specific peripherals and actuators afforded by the human labor unit, we are able to recompose them into transhuman intelligences which span beyond the individual person. By this I mean language, tools, institutions and so forth.
Computers, corporations, and cultures all operate on these same principles of exteriorized intelligence. We take ideas and combine them like legos and pass them on and see what works. This is what humans do. We are niche creators, like beavers, but we create habitats for ideas.
All the different structures we create, the way society lumbers on with its own momentum despite the preferences of people within it, the time-binding philosophical necromachinery of capital, that is the general intellect. The collective product of all past toil.
As each development stacks on the next, from language agriculture, math, engineering, science, computers, they create combinatoric explosions of novelty. Each level requires higher density of computation and energy use to push the frontier though.
The general intellect evaluates this by pricing human labor (somewhat! Not perfect but a useful model!). If you go by this metric, most of the things society values are done by “using a computer in a loop and recombining different ideas until you solve a problem”. Everything else is unbundled, bureaucratic, mechanized, or soon will be. Software eats hardware eats wetware eats world.
So if Claude Code is good enough to to do that, combine ideas on the computer, then I think it is “artificial general intellect” at least. And that is good enough to create a new frontier…