What is intelligence?

Many thoughts have been made on trying to define intelligence. What is it actually? And does our way of defining intelligence have anything to do with our culture? Some people say it would be defined otherwise if we were Chinese.

I think intelligence has a lot to do with personality. The way you act, think and prioritize has a lot to do with your personality. So if you are the type that does not plan a lot ahead might look unintelligent since you missed to take a certain event into consideration. On the other hand a person that always plans everything might be unable to handle exceptions. So what is then intelligence and what is mental models?

I once read a book by Stefan Engeseth called One (www.detectivemarketing.com) where he claims that 98% of all 2 years children have the potential of reaching above IQ 140. And only 2% of all 18 years old had the same potential. So what is happening between 2 and 18? Are we giving our children such bad conditions so they loose all that potential? Think of what could happen if we can find ways of closing that gap. What a wionderful world it would be, or would it? It might become a terrible place of overly intelligent people.

Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos investigates new methods of learning in their book "New learning revolution". It might be one step towards increasing the total intelligence in our society.

Finally I will just cover some thoughts by the Futurologist Ian Pearson (http://www.bt.com/sphere/insights/pearson/index.htm). He means that by the end of the 21st century machines will be smarter that humans and we can only hope that they will like to talk to us. As I'm also interested in AI and machine intelligence this would be fantastic if he is right. Perhaps I should switch career and start developing AI systems instead.