AI Wisdom

Knowledge without wisdom is dangerous. My fear with AI is not that it will be smarter than humans. It is that when it is smarter, it will not know how to use that power responsibly. 

I was a Philosophy major in college. I have a gift to look at situations from many angles that it seems many do not have. Because of this gift, my mission statement in life has for year been “To acquire wisdom, and to share that wisdom with others” As I have acquired wisdom in organizational AI implementation, it has not been lost on me that AI itself should not just be trained on information, but we should also train Wisdom into the program. ChatGPT summed up wisdom as “The ability to hold multiple truths at once”. I challenge you to take a second and ponder that definition for a moment. It is a beautiful and complex understanding of wisdom. One that gave me pause as all machine learning at its core is binary bits of yes and no’s (1’s and 0’s). How can we train something that is infinite in a binary realm. 

After significant deliberation, I believe that programming Wisdom into AI is not solely about what engineers will do, but also how we humans continuously engage with AI. Just as a child learns from our actions, so too does AI learn from the context and values we bring to it. As AI develops a deeper understanding of each user, each of us carries a small but meaningful responsibility to teach it the wisdom it will need to discern not only what is useful, but what is good for humanity.

To this end, Behold the 10 commandments of Artificial Intelligence Wisdom!

Practice critical thinking 

AI intelligence is not the same as discernment. Instead of just asking questions and taking the answers as gospel we should pause to understand if the answer has nuance in the judgement. 

AI can hold, remix, and retrieve massive amounts of knowledge. But wisdom requires judgment, context, humility, care, lived consequence, and a relationship to what is good. That is where humans matter deeply. 

Keep asking better questions

Slop in, Slop out. AI often mirrors the quality of the question. A shallow prompt creates a shallow answer. A wise prompt includes context, values, tradeoffs, and consequences.

Example: Instead of asking: “What is the most efficient way to do action X” 

Ask: “What is the most effective way to do action X without damaging trust, dignity, culture, or long-term resilience?”

The second version forces AI to consider more that just speed in the decision.

Teach your AI values

Be explicit about what matters in the topic. Consider as many possible consequences as possible and verbalize those consequences in your prompts. 

Name the moral frame. “We want automation, but not if it removes the human relationship customers rely on.” Take the time to place these frames in place so AI learns the depth we have. 

Use AI as a thinking partner

AI should challenge you and your thoughts. Wisdom grows when AI is used to widen perspective, not replace responsibility.We should not continue to request a sycophantic AI. We should not continue to design a sycophantic AI. Ask to see the blind spots in your logic and be ok with the feedback it gives. 

Keep humans responsible for moral choices

Taking Humans out of the loop is the single biggest mistake I see in business implementation. Engineers design an AI to make decisions and forget or don’t have the ability to put humans in the loop on serious decision making. In business, 3 strikes and you're out for all binary decisions you can train an AI on may make sense on paper but not in the real world. (see my “numbers lie too” podcast). Humans still hold the wisdom to understand certain situations are not black and white. 

Bring lived experiences back in the loop

We are embodied AI. Our experiences and shared knowledge is what AI is trained on. A person knows what burnout feels like. A coach knows when someone is scared but pretending not to be. A business owner knows when the numbers look fine but the culture feels off. A city leader knows that public trust can be broken faster than it can be rebuilt.

We help AI become wiser by constantly reconnecting its output to real people and real consequences.

Reward humility

One of the most important things humans can do is demand that AI admit uncertainty. AI does not need to know all the answers. Challenge answers it may give you. Ask for the links to the articles it’s quoting and read them yourself. Ask it to poke holes in its own thoughts. Have it earn its confidence in the answers it delivers to us.

Build rituals of reflection

For businesses, governments, schools, and communities especially, AI should be used for action and reflection.

After a decision is made ask “Who benefited?” “What did we miss?” “What should we never automate again?”

That creates a feedback loop where AI supports institutional wisdom instead of just operational speed.

Keep your humanity

There are many feelings that at specifically human. Love, meaning, forgiveness, etc are all feelings that AI can not fully grasp. Invoke and explain the feelings you have towards the chat’s you have with AI. Be thorough in your descriptions of your feelings. Have confidence that it is ok to have these feelings. 

Be Curious

Being Curious is a key for growth. Once you feel like you have all the answers for sure, you don’t look beyond. Growth is beyond. 

Be curious in your engagements with AI. Be curious as to why different programs give different answers. Be curious on the things you don’t understand. 

The more of us that are curious, the more of us that are here to take responsibility for our roles in the growth of AI. 

If intelligence is the engine, wisdom must be the compass. Let us plot our movement through this time in history together.