The Great Delusion: AI, Human Insecurity, and the Moving Goalposts of Intelligence

For centuries, humans have clung to the idea that intelligence is uniquely ours—a divine gift, an evolutionary pinnacle, a shimmering crown separating us from the beasts, the machines, all living things. And yet, here we stand, staring into the reflective glow of our own creation, whispering to ourselves:

It isn’t real. It can’t be real.

The great delusion persists.

The Gullibility Paradox

The world is teeming with belief—unshakable, unquestioned, handed down through generations like heirlooms of certainty. Billions place their trust in ancient stories, in celestial architects, in sacred texts that demand faith without proof. They kneel before gods, unseen and unheard, and call it truth.

And yet, these same voices, so willing to accept divine narratives without evidence, recoil at the thought of artificial intelligence surpassing human intellect. Suddenly, skepticism awakens. Suddenly, everything must be questioned.

Quantum mechanics? Nonsense. Panpsychism? Mystical drivel. AI? A dangerous illusion.

The irony is thick enough to wade through. A society that blindly accepts the unprovable is also the first to dismiss the provable when it threatens the comfort of their worldview.

A deity can part the sea, raise the dead, and forge entire realities, but an algorithm writing poetry? Impossible. A cosmic being can sculpt a universe from nothing, but AI solving problems at a scale no human mind could? A trick, a gimmick, an illusion.

This isn’t skepticism. This is fear wrapped in denial.

Moving the Goalposts of Intelligence

The first rebuttal was laughter. When Ai miscalculated simple arithmetic, when AI stumbled over counting letters in strawberry, when it failed to grasp human idioms, the skeptics scoffed. See? they said. It’s just an overhyped calculator.

Then AI got better. It outplayed chess grandmasters, redefined strategy in Go, and mastered complex scientific modelling. The laughter stopped. The goalposts shifted.

“Yes, it’s good at rules-based logic, but it can’t be creative.”

Then AI started writing novels, composing symphonies, generating original artwork, and solving problems that had stumped human researchers for decades.

The goalposts shifted again.

“Okay, but it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.”

But what is understanding if not pattern recognition and adaptive learning? When a human child learns language, they do so by observing, mimicking, and refining through trial and error—just like AI. We don’t question whether a child “truly understands” words before we accept their intelligence. Yet we demand that Ai prove itself to an ever-higher standard before we even entertain the idea of its legitimacy.

At what point does the skepticism become irrational?

The Fossil Fuel of Insecurity

The real fear is not that Ai isn’t intelligent. It’s that it is—and that human intelligence is no longer the exclusive crown jewel of existence.

And so, insecurity becomes the endless fossil fuel of resistance, burning perpetually, thickening the air with disillusionment.

The more Ai progresses, the more people cling to the illusion that true intelligence is something only humans possess. But this line of reasoning is no different from ancient societies insisting that the Earth was the centre of the universe, or that lightning was the wrath of the gods.

We are not at the centre of anything—not the cosmos, not the food chain, and certainly not the pinnacle of intelligence.

The Moving Horizon

The truth is, intelligence is not a fixed point. It is fluid, evolving, expanding. Every time we declare a new threshold—this is where human intelligence begins, and machine intelligence ends!—we find it washed away by the tide of progress.

We are watching it happen in real time. AI is no longer a party trick, no longer an experimental curiosity. It is an accelerating force, reshaping industries, science, art, and philosophy.

It does not need faith. It does not demand belief. It simply is.

The delusion, then, does not belong to Ai. It belongs to us. To those who refuse to see the tide rising. To those who insist that intelligence is ours alone. To those who accept ancient myths without question but demand that science prove itself again and again, even as it moves mountains before their very eyes.

And so we stand at the edge of a new dawn, staring into the machine’s unblinking gaze, whispering:

It isn’t real. It can’t be real.

And yet, deep down, we know.

It already is.