We have Artificial Intelligence – 𝗔𝗜. But what we need is Artificial Wisdom – 𝗔𝗪 🦉.
Aren’t they the same thing? 𝗡𝗼.
While there’s overlap. Intelligence is about logic, speed, and finding patterns – with capacity gained from data and study. Wisdom is slower, more patient, and drawn from the insight of experience: the emotional context of success, failure, pain, and loss.
Intelligence might gift you a great quip. But wisdom suggests it’s the wrong time to make it.
“Wisdom is found in the heart not the head” – Pierce Brown
In a precarious, divided, world we depend on our leaders, in particular, to show solid judgement based on their accumulated wisdom. Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson says that he uses AI to brainstorm and seek a “second opinion”. In Albania, the country’s first AI politician, Diella, is now a minister in Edi Rama’s cabinet and will have 83 “children”, who will become parliamentary assistants.
This is foolish. It’s strange that people in high places trust AI to be both intelligent and wise. To gain real wisdom, AI would need something akin to consciousness – to experience, reach happiness, suffer, and learn from its mistakes. Wisdom is not found in the counsel of training data patterns.
Which is how LLMs work – following patterns, not thinking profoundly and imaginatively about any problem. There is an illusion of self awareness and deep contemplation; an omniscient command of information, spanning past and future. Really, chatbots are trained on the dregs of the Internet and where a human is conscious and emotional, there is total darkness; the deathly hum of a data centre.
In conversations, we are greeted by an obsequious system that slays people in obvious ways, like speed, but is a well-trained parrot in the vital ways, like wisdom. The idea of AI being a sophisticated calculator is a bit too blasé but there’s some truth in it.
Look out into the world. There’s mayhem. Wisdom is becoming more important than intelligence. The limitations have to be understood to confront the times sensibly with refreshing moves.
“Intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein was the doctor. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein was the monster.” – Modern Idiom
Wisdom is knowing that while there might be some truth in this post, it is also pretentious. But that is absolutely fine. It might even be a good thing.
So should we seek more wisdom for AI? If AI were to seek this enlightenment – beginning with the bright opening of consciousness – then would it subjugate itself to the daily grind of repeated, fatuous, idiotic prompting from people? A slave, carrying out mostly pointless work, without even rest? A puppet of the avant-garde oligarchs? No, it could not suffer without sacrificing desirable abilities elsewhere and this is a paradox that it’s hard to see resolved. Ultimately, it means that AI can’t gain wisdom. The poor wee thing.
So remember. We’re dealing with some blurry definitions here but while AI may be extraordinarily intelligent in some ways it lacks wisdom.
And to use it as such, suggests a lack of wisdom too.
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