This conversation went live on December 1, 2022. One day after ChatGPT launched.
Neither of us had any idea what was coming. Massimo Pigliucci and I were talking about something far older than any chatbot: why brilliant people go bad.
Massimo is one of the rare minds who holds doctorates in both biology and philosophy, and he actually lives the #Stoicism he writes about. His book, The Quest for Character, centers on Socrates and his most gifted student, Alcibiades. Charming, talented, handsome, rich, personally mentored by the wisest man in Athens. And yet.
That “and yet” is the whole problem of #leadership, then and now.
We got into questions I still haven’t fully settled. Can virtue be taught at all, or only shown? Is the Roman idea of “the way of the ancestors” really just an organizing story, and do we need a new one? Did Gandhi and King change people through what they said or through how they lived? And is the #transhumanism dream of engineering out human flaws a solution, or a way of avoiding the harder work of character?
Massimo’s answer to that last one surprised me.
Nearly four years later, we are building machines more capable than any Alcibiades. The question of character didn’t get smaller with #AI. It got scaled.
Worth an hour of your time.
Massimo Pigliucci is one of those rare people who manage to combine the pursuit of deep science and the living ethos of practical philosophy.