The Genealogy of Intelligence and D.Y. Tenen's Template Culture

The article analyzes the concept of intelligence presented by Dennis Yi Tenen in the book 'Literary Theory for Robots.' The author challenges the treatment of intelligence as an internal characteristic of an organism, proposing instead to view it as a distributed cognition process, where thinking occurs through the interaction of mind, body, and tools. The text points to the historical process of externalizing cognition—from dictionaries to LLM language models. Contemporary AI is not presented as an autonomous subject, but as a radical form of 'template culture' that compresses accumulated human labor. The author warns against the trap of linguistic metaphors that attribute agency to algorithms, obscuring the fact that they are elements of a broader cognitive system rather than independent thinking entities.