# ARI: Artificial Random Intelligence

*From cogito ergo sum to sigma ergo sum · 16 September 2026 · Zachariah Roydel Robertson*

I am working on a new coinage: Artificial Random Intelligence, or ARI for short. I think there needs to be a de-emphasis on the Kurzweilian portrayal of a sudden implosion of singularity-style superintelligence at some future date, say 2037, or 2042, or 2046. We are, as Lawrence Neil concedes, already in the Singularity.

Realising this, I interpret and implement principles found in quantum mechanics and quantum superposition in computing, moving from the binary compute of 1s and 0s to a manifest random implementation: arbitrary and capricious threshold activation functions and randomly assigned weights, within a pre-ordained and relatively ordered neural framework, a circuit of cognition. I understand this is highly speculative, but so is theoretical physics, and the people working on those questions, like Ed Witten and Kai-Fu Lee, seem pretty smart to me.

## The inhuman test

Strictly speaking, every idea conceived in its raw intention and inception starts as a falsifiable hypothesis that is highly speculative. Remember, they used to burn witches and brand women with scarlet letters for deeds far less consequential. The point of all this is that we are monkeys on a rather big rock. When we take granular rocks from the big rock we are on, we can mill them down to sand and make silicon chips embedded with a confluence of 1s and 0s. With these we write binary codes (React, Python, Java, C++) and build systems and scripts that control our technologies for us.

From there we may build new technologies on top of these and program them to think as we do. But I think that is the wrong idea. Those primitive programming languages were really the first insignia of general or artificial intelligence. Perhaps we should model the intelligence we seek not on the human genome and its DNA and RNA archetypes, but on the antipode: an extraterrestrial being with no skin in the game whatsoever.

I do not want our intelligent systems corroded by human structures: emotion, relations, greed, money, capitalism and so forth. These arbitrary constructs to which we assign value spoil the chemistry of the AI; they corrode the use case.

The litmus test must not be how human we can make AI, but how inhuman.

## Beyond the Turing Test

The Turing Test fails in its limiting constraints. We need an entirely new framework, an extraterrestrial and randomised framework for assigning weights to neural systems, that will create a preponderance of new problems, thoughts and solutions. We must combine Foucault's folie and œuvre to rid ourselves of the biological constraints of madness and sanity. The Apollonian and Dionysian concepts misconstrue the complexity before us.

We must take Oppenheimer's line, borrowed from Lord Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds", and invert it, as I first proposed while studying law and developing frameworks on the tension between police enforcement and the First Amendment rights of citizens and prisoners to free exercise and expression:

Now I am become life, the creator of worlds.

## Sigma ergo sum

My first serious philosophical article, at Virginia Tech, took the Cartesian cogito ergo sum and derived from it sigma ergo sum: a framework for understanding AI and enigmatic systems in the context of consciousness and the Turing Test. It rested on Wittgenstein: to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

Today the most prominent form of life is code: computer code, or, to be precise, mathematics. Ergo, we must advance mathematical proof and discovery to deepen our quest for consciousness in computer systems. Think Real Randomised Intelligence, as opposed to Artificial General Intelligence.

This is the only way.