This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recently been discussing "artificial general intelligence" that matches or surpasses human capabilities. This is from the same person who has said children born today (including his own) will "never be more intelligent than AI, from a 'raw IQ'" (intelligence quotient) perspective.
President Donald Trump has also recently mused about who is and who is not "high IQ." As a scholar rooted in the history of Canadian higher education and its intersections with rhetoric around disability and race, I get jumpy every time I hear the word "intelligence," including as "IQ." "Intelligence" clearly has a high-stakes and worrisome future, but also a dark history. To figure out what AI might be replacing, we need to better understand intelligence as a historically situated idea—and a dangerous one—rather than as some sort of biological fact. For universities, this reflection matters as institutions confront questions about how their responses to AI align with their missions.
In the early 20th century, universities, university disciplines and academic careers were built by crafting scientific-sounding definitions and measures of "intelligence" and "IQ." As historian Gerald Thompson notes, the creator and head of the University of Toronto's department of educational research, Peter Sandiford, tested the "intelligence" of Chinese and Japanese Canadian students in British Columbia in the 1920s. This was done under the direction of the first full professor of education at the University of British Columbia, George Moir Weir. The research, writes Thompson, "was meant to confirm" long-standing racist notions of Anglo-white superiority and Asian inferiority.
As historians like Angus McLaren have demonstrated, such projects were the work of eugenics. These projects defined intelligence as a genetic and inheritable trait that could be measured but not necessarily easily developed within individuals and assumed a pseudoscientific racialized genetic hierarchy. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
Researchers involved in such projects ranked Canadians, and these rankings determined educational and social futures. Eugenic ideas of intelligence deeply shaped residential schools and their colonial legacies. Sociologist Alexandra Giancarlo has documented how in the 1930s, Kenneth E.
Kidd, who went on to found the "Indian-Eskimo Studies" program at Trent University, administered a series of IQ tests at the Mohawk Institute, a residential school in southern Ontario. This led to two published books that advanced racist ideas around intelligence and informed Department of Indian Affairs policy not just for children at the Mohawk Institute, but at residential schools across the country. Some of the researchers—such as Weir, Kidd and Sandiford, who contributed to popularizing these ideas—went on to build university programs and disciplines.
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