Alfred North Whitehead wrote that civilization advances by increasing the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.
He meant that as a compliment.
We have since built a technology whose whole purpose is to extend that list, for everyone, at once, permanently. Which raises a question I rarely see asked:
What happens when #ArtificialIntelligence finishes the list?
Human genius is not the bottleneck here. It never was. Genius sent our machines to Mars. Genius also shows up in the biographies of history’s most gifted scientists, artists, and founders, most of whom made a spectacular mess of their own lives. Talent and character are not the same currency, and having a pile of one tells you nothing about the other.
So the question in this piece is not whether we are clever enough to build something godlike. We obviously are. It is whether we are wise enough to survive it.
Rumi turns up. So does Marcus Aurelius. So do the Greek and Norse gods, who wielded power that makes our data centers look modest, and destroyed themselves with it anyway.
I published this before wisdom became a slide in everyone’s corporate #AI deck. Two years on, it has aged in the wrong direction, which is to say, the right one.
Please tell me where I am wrong!
There’s no doubt that has genius, but do we have enough wisdom? Are we merely clever, or are we truly wise?