Are Human and Artificial Intelligence a Martingale Against Each Other?

HBI — Kenneth Myers — 2026‑04‑08 — 11%

Definition of the HBI

This is a speculation whose assumptions are unclear even to its author. It explores whether the long‑term interaction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence behaves like a martingale — a process whose expected future value equals its present value, no matter how much information you have.

The Half‑Baked Thought

A martingale is a strange creature: a process that, despite accumulating history, refuses to drift. No matter what has happened so far, the expected next step is… the same.

This raises a mischievous question: What if the co‑evolution of human and artificial intelligence is a martingale?

Not in the strict probabilistic sense — that would require assumptions no sane person would make — but in the conceptual sense that:

  • every gain in AI capability forces humans to adapt,

  • every gain in human capability forces AI to be redesigned,

  • and the “expected advantage” of either side remains roughly constant.

In other words, intelligence might not be a race but a fair game.

The Central Question

Is the human–AI relationship:

  • a martingale, where each side’s expected advantage remains neutral,

  • a submartingale, where AI’s expected advantage grows over time,

  • a supermartingale, where human intelligence retains a structural edge,

  • or none of the above, because intelligence is not a stochastic process but a messy, co‑adaptive system that refuses to fit into any clean mathematical box?

A Speculative Analogy

If human intelligence is the “capital” and AI is the “strategy,” then perhaps the system behaves like a gambler who keeps updating their bets based on new information — but the house (reality) keeps adjusting the odds in response.

Every time AI gets better at prediction, humans shift to tasks that require new forms of abstraction. Every time humans expand their conceptual space, AI architectures are redesigned to follow. The expected difference stays… weirdly stable.

This is not equilibrium. It’s something more like dynamic neutrality.

The Half‑Baked Conclusion

If the human–AI system is a martingale, then:

  • neither side is “winning”,

  • neither side is “losing”,

  • and the value of intelligence is conserved through adaptation rather than competition.

But if it’s not a martingale — if it’s drifting — then the drift itself becomes the interesting object: Is intelligence accumulating, leaking, compounding, or redistributing?

This idea is, of course, half‑baked. Its assumptions are unclear even to its author. But it feels like the beginning of a question worth asking.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reprogramming Bacteria for Symbiont Conversion: A Review

Bacteria are prokaryotic cells some of which have positive effects upon the human organism and some of which have negative effects. I coined the term “symbiont conversion” for methods that convert, or reprogram, bacteria (and other cells, such as tumor cells) that have a negative effect to cells that have a positive effect. With such methods the urgent problem of antibiotic resistance could be solved. [Volko2025] This short paper is about such methods, but in a more broad context – I want to review different approaches towards the reprogramming of bacteria and not necessarily in the context of symbiont conversion, although symbiont conversion is the motivation for doing this literature survey. Basically a literature survey shows that there are two different approaches towards the reprogramming of bacteria: On the one hand, bacteria can be reprogrammed by altering their genes, for example by using bacteriophages (viruses that target bacteria) or methods like CRISPR/Cas9. These approache...
Read more

Summary of "The Inappropriately Excluded"

The late Michael Wells Ferguson was the author of the article "The Inappropriately Excluded", which I consider a classic and a must-read. Many highly intelligent people dream of reaching high positions in society, such as becoming university professors or winning the Nobel Prize. Ferguson shows that professors, doctors, judges, etc. are on average not that smart and that people with far above average intelligence usually do not get into these positions. The reason is not that these people have shortcomings but that highly intelligent people are systematically discriminated against. <<In the popular culture, IQ has become a point of contention. Many people credulously accept that the eminent have very high IQs and that people of ordinary accomplishment have ordinary IQs. For example, it was widely reported that Garry Kasparov has an IQ of 190. In truth, his IQ is verified to be 135.>> <<Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consisten...
Read more

A Proof of the CTMU - Sketch

The CTMU is a theoretic model proposed by Christopher Langan. More information on it can be found at: https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/ The core statement of the CTMU is: The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe is a language that describes itself. Another statement is: The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe is equivalent to Reality. From this follows: The universe is a language that describes itself. A language is a set of words that are generated using a set of rules called a formal grammar. A language can describe other languages - for example, English can describe French - and it can also describe itself - English can describe English. There is nothing that exists outside of the universe - everything that exists does so inside the universe. For this reason whatever describes the universe, as well as the language using which it does it, exists inside the universe. Therefore it it is legitimate to state that the universe describes itself. Since the language using which the...
Read more