Intelligence refers to all the mental functions and capabilities linked to conceptual and rational knowledge. It also refers to one’s ability to understand.

An intelligent person is able to easily adapt when facing new situations and to find solutions to problems by using the abilities acquired thanks to past experiences.

Owning knowledge and skills isn’t enough to be intelligent, you also need to know when and how to use them properly to be productive and effective. You have to think to be intelligent.

At school, we often consider that the ones who have the best grades are the most clever. However, intelligence and knowledge are two different things (see knowledge) : one can be successful at school only by reciting knowledge that they don’t understand, without thinking, to the teachers. An individual can be bad at school and be more intelligent than the top student of the class.

To be intelligent you need to think, to ask yourself the right questions, to have a critical mind.

Intelligence is a weapon, it gives us power (see power) that we can use to do good or bad. Someone who’s cruel can use their intelligence to hurt other people (see cruelty).

Nowadays, with all the new technologies, the definition of intelligence is questioned by the creation of what we call artificial intelligence. One may wonder : What does it mean to give some intelligence to a machine? Can a machine think and be rational? What does it mean for us who are humans with a “natural” intelligence? Unlike us, machines don’t have an intuition, or an instinct. Maybe intelligence is actually just a series of calculations and algorithms that our brain saves just like machines do.