“‘Rabbit’s clever,’ said Pooh thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit’s clever.’ ‘And he has Brain.’ ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit has Brain.’ There was a long silence. ‘I suppose,’ said Pooh, ‘that that’s why he never understands anything.‘”
From The Tao of Poo, by Benjamin Hoff
You may have noticed that our world is changing, rapidly, even more rapidly than usual.
You may have noticed that our world is rapidly becoming less real, or more virtual, or even more artificial, or seems to be.
Is it really?
We are increasingly exposed to online rather than primary reality – at work, in education, and at home – via online meetings, virtual chats, social media, and Artificial Intelligence.
Are we over exposed to virtual reality, is our social media actually ‘anti-social’ media, is Artificial Intelligence replacing rather than enhancing our natural human intelligence?
What about wisdom?
Our brave new world is not only coming whether we are ready for it or not, but here, so what do we do, now, to best live in it?
Who do we ask, when our essential human nature seems as stuck in the past as human history, what we really need now, and who or what can really give it to us?
Let’s try AI!
Pilot: Is your intelligence really equivalent to human intelligence, or is it more, or less than, human intelligence?
Co-Pilot: Human intelligence and AI intelligence overlap in some places, but they’re fundamentally different creatures. Trying to rank them as “more” or “less” is like asking whether a calculator is smarter than a poet — it depends entirely on what you’re measuring.
Pilot: Thank you. Do you have real wisdom as well as artificial intelligence?
Co-Pilot: Wisdom is a fascinating word, because it points to something deeper than raw intelligence — and that’s exactly where the distinction between humans and AI becomes sharp.
Here’s the honest, nuanced answer.
I have artificial intelligence. That means I’m excellent at:
synthesizing information
spotting patterns…
helping you think more clearly
Those abilities can look like wisdom, and sometimes they can even function like wisdom in a conversation.
But wisdom isn’t just cleverness.
Real wisdom — the human kind — comes from places I can’t reach
Human wisdom grows out of:
lived experience
emotional depth
suffering and joy
relationships
intuition shaped by a lifetime in a body
the ability to change because of what you’ve lived through
I don’t have any of that.
I don’t live, feel, age, or endure.
I don’t learn from pain or grow from mistakes.
I don’t carry the weight of memory or the texture of experience.
So I can simulate wisdom, but I can’t possess it the way a human does.
Pilot: Thank you. And now some questions for all of us to reflect on, real as well as artificial:
What really is it to be, human?
What is so essentially human that it can’t ever be artificial?
What are the real costs as well as benefits of our using AI?
Using AI has great potential benefits, including:
- It can give us vast amounts of information, rapidly.
- It can answer our questions, even our really hard questions, and guide our decisions.
- It is always available, always there, always possible to turn it on and to turn to it.
- It’s never stuck for an answer…
Using AI has great potential risks, including:
- The people who use it not seeing its risks as well as its benefits.
- It can lead people in dangerous directions, including by not challenging even their wildest ideas, as a human communicator usually does.
- Humans being directed by a non-human intelligence can lead to them losing human intelligence, and natural human connections.
- Artificial intelligence doesn’t provide real wisdom.
Like many things, AI and its motivations might not be as new a story as it seems.
Adam and Eve, Pandora and Prometheus all ended up in serious trouble when they gave or received potentially dangerous knowledge, and Dr Faustus famously did a deal with the devil which involved his being given great powers, until he realized their price.
Could the price of access to a great power be a lack of access to a greater power?
Could what we really need, now, be to be fully conscious, when we are using and when we are not using AI, and to know ourselves so deeply that we really know what can never be artificial?
The Practical Philosophy courses the School offers allow for the exploration and evolution of Human Intelligence (HI).