Senior Fellow Luncheon with Matt Ratto
Is Intelligence General? AGI and its Alternatives
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has become one of the most powerful imaginaries driving research, industry, and public debate. Promising machines with human-like breadth of cognition, AGI captures attention but also risks obscuring more pressing questions: what is intelligence, and how should it be designed into our technologies? Decades of research in cognitive science, psychology, and human–computer interaction show that intelligence is not a universal, context-free capacity but a situated, relational, and socially embedded phenomenon. Drawing on these insights, this talk critiques the dream of “general” intelligence and presents Artificial Contextual Intelligence (ACI) as a compelling alternative. ACI emphasizes systems that are bounded yet multi-faceted, able to work effectively within the rich social, cultural, and organizational contexts where real problems arise. By highlighting critiques of AGI’s universality and exploring the promise of ACI, this talk makes the case that designing context-aware, accountable, and socially aligned AI is not just a theoretical exercise—it is essential for building technologies that serve human communities fairly, responsibly, and with impact.
We will be joined by Speaker Matt Ratto from the Faculty of Information.
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Speaker
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Matt RattoMatt Ratto is Associate Dean, Research and a full Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research explores the social production of knowledge in the context of emerging digital technologies and leverages critical theories and perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to develop novel insights and design paradigms. He was awarded the Ontario Minister of College and Universities’ Award of Excellence in 2020, and has received two Canada Grand Challenge grants, Stars in Global health and Transition to Scale. Recent contributions include novel work that explores the social knowledge and contextual intelligence of LLMs (Social Agentics, 2025 ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, Ratto et. al, 2025), including applied work in mental healthcare (A Fully Generative Motivational Interviewing Counsellor Chatbot for Moving Smokers Towards the Decision to Quit, https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.1283/, Mahmood et al., Findings 2025) and in the development of participatory methods for AI development, (Participatory Development of a Gender-Specific Smoking Cessation Smartphone App for Women, The Annals of Family Medicine Nov 2024, 22, Melamed et al, 2024).
