Why the ugly history of IQ testing matters for AI and education

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recently been discussing “artificial general intelligence” that matches or surpasses human capabilities.

This is from the same person who has said children born today (including his own) will “never be more intelligent than AI, from a ‘raw IQ’” (intelligence quotient) perspective.

United States President Donald Trump has also recently mused about who is and who is not “high IQ.” As a scholar rooted in the history of Canadian higher education and its intersections with rhetoric around disability and race , every time I hear the word “intelligence,” including as “IQ,” I get jumpy.

“Intelligence” clearly has a high-stakes and worrisome future, but also a dark history.

To figure out what AI might be replacing, we need to better understand intelligence as a historically situated idea — and a dangerous one — rather than as some sort of biological fact.

For universities, this reflection matters as institutions confront questions about how their responses to AI align with their missions.

Read more: What is intelligence? For millennia, western literature has suggested it may be a liability ‘Intelligence’ and eugenics In the early 20th century, universities, university disciplines and academic careers were built by crafting scientific-sounding definitions and measures of “intelligence” and “IQ.” .

As historian Gerald Thompson notes , the creator and head of the University of Toronto’s department of educational research, Peter Sandiford , tested the “intelligence” of Chinese and Japanese Canadian students in British Columbia in the 1920s.

This was done under the direction of the first full professor of education at the University of British Columbia, George Moir Weir.

The research, writes Thompson, “was meant to confirm” long-standing racist notions of Anglo-white superiority and Asian inferiority.

As historians like Angus McLaren have demonstrated, such projects were the work of eugenics .

These defined intelligence as a genetic and inheritable trait that could be measured but not necessarily easily developed within individuals, and assumed a pseudo-scientific racialized genetic hierarchy.

Colonial educational legacies of eugenics Researchers involved in such projects ranked Canadians, and these rankings determined educational and social futures.

Eugenic ideas of intelligence deeply shaped residential schools and their colonial legacies.