AI Is Doing for Intelligism What the Industrial Revolution Did for Feminism

I think AI is doing for Intelligism what the Industrial Revolution once did for feminism. The trouble is, most of us still believe a sharp mind is something people earn.

Let’s start with the word.

Intelligism is a simple idea. Here is how I define it:

A person’s intelligence should not determine their human worth, or their entitlement to fundamental rights and meaningful opportunities.

In plain words: how smart you are should not decide your worth as a human. It should not decide your basic rights. And it should not decide your real chances in life.

Some of you are already frowning. What about merit? Shouldn’t the clever ones get ahead?

Okay. Let’s talk about merit.

We like to believe that merit comes from a person’s own effort. That belief has many holes in it. Most of us already accept that background plays a role. The family a child is born into matters. The society they grow up in matters. How much money their parents have matters too. All of this shapes the “merit” a person walks in with.

So why do we stop there? Why do we quietly leave out intelligence?

Now, genes are not the whole story of a mind. Effort shapes it. So do good teachers and a home full of books. But genes play their part too.

And that part is nobody’s achievement. Nobody gets to pick their genes. That share came with them at birth, the same way their surname did.

Genes are not in the business of rewarding hard work. They are in the business of dealing cards.

Now look at what AI is doing to that card game.

Picture a scene most of us remember from school. A child missed class yesterday, and today they must hand in a leave letter. Say this is the so-called “below average” student. They know exactly what they want to say. They had a fever, and they want to be excused.

The problem is the English.

Earlier, they had three options. None of them were their own. They could ask the bright student of the class to write a good-looking letter. They could ask a parent who knew the language better. Or the family could pay a tutor, if they could afford one. Either way, the neat sentences came from someone else’s head.

Now the child can type their thought into an AI and get it back clear and tidy. It is still their thought, only better dressed. A leave letter was never meant to be an English exam.

The same goes for a young person writing their first job application. They know what they can do. They just never had the polished words to say it. Now they do.

Or take a family building its own house. They know exactly how they want to live in it. Where the kitchen catches the morning light. How big the prayer room should be. Where grandmother’s cot goes so she can see the gate. Before, they had to borrow an architect’s mind to turn all that into a plan. Now they can describe it in their own words, and AI helps give it shape.

I know what is coming to your mind right now. Where exactly is this going?

A student built good English by reading books for years. Now the “below average” kid writes a leave letter just as good. An architect spent years in practice. Now someone who never once thought about design gets the same output. Is that really a good thing? Or are we simply punishing effort?

Fair question. Let me answer with a comparison.

Before the steam engine, almost everything was built with human muscle. Roads, walls, wells and boats all needed strong bodies. If you wanted something heavy moved, you went looking for strong arms.

Then machines arrived. At first they helped. Then, slowly, they took over. You can easily imagine someone back then asking our exact question. Why punish the people who worked hard to build strong bodies? Are these machines really doing any good? Isn’t this an insult to hard work and merit?

Today one JCB digs a foundation that once needed a whole crew of labourers. The person in the driver’s seat doesn’t need big shoulders. They just need to know which lever to pull. And nobody stands at the site mourning the insult to muscle.

History turned out to be a trillion times kinder to the machine than people were back then.

Here is where feminism comes in.

Brute force was one area where men had the upper hand. Once a machine does the lifting, big arms stop being the whole story. Men’s grip on that one thing loosened.

To be clear, I am not saying feminism started with the Industrial Revolution. I am only saying the machines aided feminist movements. And even that help was very slight. Patriarchy is like a hydra, the many-headed monster from Greek stories. Cut off one head, and another grows back.

But notice something. That physical strength was never a man’s own achievement. It came with the body. It was simply genetic luck.

Sound familiar? That is exactly what I said about intelligence earlier.

So here is my opinion. We are moving toward a world where more doors open for everyone, whatever their intelligence. Call it democratisation. That’s a big word for “open to all.” The reason is simple. We once purchased machines to do the work of muscle. Now we can purchase intelligence too.

Muscle went on sale first. Now brains are on the shelf as well.

Okay, that sounds rosy. But is it actually happening?

Not neatly, and I won’t pretend otherwise. There is an access divide. Not everyone has a good phone, fast internet or a paid plan. There is also an ownership divide. A handful of people own these AI systems. Everyone else just uses them. So AI quietly builds a new ladder of its own.

Unfortunately, that part is not new either.

Machines needed money, and that money sat in men’s hands. So the Industrial Revolution never handed women their rights on a golden plate. Men still controlled the machines themselves, the very base of all that new power. They designed tractors to suit their own bodies. They designed spanners to fit their own hands.

Something similar will happen with AI. Intelligent people are the ones building it right now. So they will first build AI tools that suit their own kind of intelligence. The early versions will fit the topper better than the backbencher.

It’s a real problem. I just don’t think it’s a permanent one.

Tools have a way of spreading. Slowly, drop by drop, they reach people who never built them. And the “unfair” edge that clever people enjoy today will fade, bit by bit.

Now, one parallel thought. AI may not democratise intelligence itself. But it will surely democratise the products of intelligence. It may not hand out brains. It will hand out what brains make.

Picture two students at home with the same complex maths problem. Student A can solve it completely alone. Student B cannot, but uses AI and gets the right answer anyway. For that one task, both reach the same result. Inside their heads, though, they are still very different.

AI evens out the answers. It doesn’t swap the brains.

The calculator on a shopkeeper’s counter works the same way. It totals a long bill in seconds. Nobody thinks the shopkeeper has turned into a maths genius. But nobody refuses to buy rice from them either.

Over time, even the need for that inner ability may fade. But people may still hold on to it.

Think about the gym. People lift weights every morning. Not one of them is training to hunt down the biggest deer and show it off to a mate. Dinner comes on a delivery bike now. Yet the gyms are still full.

In the same way, a student may still crack a tough calculus problem that nobody asked them to solve. People still play chess, even though computers now beat the champions. Thinking may become a gym for the mind. Not a gate you must pass to be counted.

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So let me be clear about what Intelligism is not.

It does not ask us to deny that some people are more talented than others. It does not dismiss expertise. The architect still knows things the rest of us don’t. And it does not promise that everyone ends up with the same result.

The topper is still the topper.

It asks one plain question instead. Why should those differences decide who gets access to opportunities? Especially now, when technology can make up for them more and more.

The divides are real. The hydra will keep growing new heads. But machines took one old excuse off the table, and I think AI can take another. It will be slow and uneven. I’m hopeful anyway.

Strong arms no longer get the last word.

Sharp minds shouldn’t either.