Introduction
This year, the Mensa Foundation centered its efforts on exploring human intelligence in the age of AI. As we did, we found ourselves asking deeper questions about identity, meaning, and what it truly means to be human.
Through our 2025 Colloquium, the Summer 2025 special issue of the Mensa Research Journal (MRJ), 2025 Speaker Series, and related content, we examined not just what AI can do, but how our understanding of human intelligence is evolving alongside it.
We are grateful to everyone who leaned into this exploration with us. It is not easy to question long-held assumptions, especially when the world is changing so quickly that yesterday’s certainties are less stable. But that is precisely why this work matters. The knowledge we gained this year will help us engage the future with greater clarity, courage, and care.
Here are the five key insights we gained.
1. Human and artificial intelligence are best framed as complementary, not competitive.
In his editorial overview for the MRJ special issue, guest editor Matthew Guggemos synthesizes the issue’s contributions and concludes that human and artificial intelligence are best understood as complementary. AI excels at data processing and pattern recognition, while humans remain unmatched in creativity, contextual understanding, ethical reasoning, and emotional intelligence.
2. The risk is not AI itself, but passive reliance that weakens human thinking.
The MRJ article “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking,” summarized in the editorial, reports that higher confidence in AI correlated with reduced critical-thinking effort among knowledge workers using generative AI. Guggemos highlights this as a warning about “cognitive atrophy” when AI outputs are consumed passively rather than engaged critically, emphasizing that effective use requires mindful, deliberate interaction.
3. A new human skill is emerging: meta-intelligence, or “intelligence curation.”
At the Colloquium, Liz Ngonzi introduced her 1+1+AI framework, showing how individual expertise, collective wisdom, and AI can be combined to produce better outcomes than any one of them alone. Rather than treating AI as a standalone solution, her approach positioned humans as “intelligence curators” who decide what questions to ask, which sources to trust, and how to turn insights into action.
4. AI can be impressive, but it does not yet match the relational depth of human intelligence.
In our Speaker Series event on HI, AI, and Personhood, philosopher Dr. Peter Steeves invited participants to consider what distinguishes human intelligence from current AI systems. He emphasized that human understanding is embodied, relational, and built through lived experience and not just the manipulation of data. Even as AI becomes more persuasive and fluent, that does not automatically make it conscious or “person-like.”
5. Tools are never value-neutral; our AI Mentor exploration underscored that any tool must reflect community values.
This year we also asked whether the Foundation should pursue an AI-based mentor, building on the Study of Unmet Needs among highly intelligent individuals. In our article Rethinking Traditional Mentorship, we shared what we learned from surveying hundreds of Mensans and supporters. Respondents told us that any AI Mentor would need to expand access, draw on a curated Mensa knowledge base rather than generic web data, and be grounded in ethics, privacy, transparency, and human oversight. That feedback made clear that the question is not just “can we build it?” but “should we — and if so, how?”
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