That's an interesting way to frame it- and you're right that we've always built on collective knowledge. But I think the critical shift is ‘who controls the aggregation point’.

I think the distributed intelligence you're describing had no single gatekeeper. What we're calling 'AI' is that same collective knowledge, but now funneled through proprietary architectures controlled by about four companies.

So the 'artificial' part might not be the intelligence itself… maybe it's the ownership structure. We're essentially watching centuries of human cooperation get enclosed and monetized in real time. That seems worth examining, even if the technological progression itself was inevitable.