{"id":244568,"date":"2026-09-28T09:04:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T14:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/massimo-pigliucci-on-story-virtue-character-and-ai"},"modified":"2026-09-28T09:04:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T14:04:01","slug":"massimo-pigliucci-on-story-virtue-character-and-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/massimo-pigliucci-on-story-virtue-character-and-ai","title":{"rendered":"Massimo Pigliucci on Story, Virtue, Character and AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/massimo-pigliucci-on-story-virtue-character-and-ai.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/1393431334-singularity1on1-massimo-pigliucci-character.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>This conversation went live on December 1, 2022. One day after ChatGPT launched.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>That \u201cand yet\u201d is the whole problem of #leadership, then and now.<\/p>\n<p>We got into questions I still haven\u2019t fully settled. Can virtue be taught at all, or only shown? Is the Roman idea of \u201cthe way of the ancestors\u201d 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?<\/p>\n<p>Massimo\u2019s answer to that last one surprised me.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/massimo-pigliucci-on-story-virtue-character-and-ai\">Continue reading \u201cMassimo Pigliucci on Story, Virtue, Character and AI\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-robotics-ai","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}