Creating the future

Shevek goes even further. He argues that prediction is intelligence: “Is the emergence of intelligence merely a side effect of ‘solving’ prediction, or are prediction and intelligence actually equivalent?” He favors the latter. Not only is an internal model of the world or others good, he argues, when it effectively predicts the future—it is also good merely because it can, and does: “In fact, evolutionarily speaking, only creatures with models that successfully predict their own future even have a future!”