Artificial Intelligence and Real Stupidity

We are worrying that artificial intelligence will become too intelligent.

Perhaps we should be worrying about something else.

What happens when intelligence becomes abundant, but wisdom does not?

We tend to think of intelligence and wisdom as if they were points on the same scale.

More intelligence means better decisions.

But history tells us otherwise.

Some of the most intelligent people in the world have made extraordinarily foolish decisions.

And that distinction may become even more important in the age of AI.

Intelligence is not wisdom

Intelligence is the ability to understand, calculate, analyse, predict and solve problems.

Wisdom is knowing which problems are worth solving, which consequences matter, and when not to act at all.

A highly intelligent person can construct a brilliant strategy that produces a disastrous outcome.

A highly intelligent leader can win an election, build an enormous organisation, negotiate complex deals and make rapid decisions—and still make profoundly unwise choices.

Because intelligence can answer:

"Can we do this?"

Wisdom asks:

"Should we?"

AI is becoming extraordinarily good at the first question.

The second is much harder.

Consider business

Some of the most powerful technology products in the world were built by exceptionally intelligent people.

Recommendation engines that predict exactly what will keep you scrolling.

Feeds that learn precisely what will make you stay a few minutes longer.

Systems that can calculate, with remarkable precision, what content will provoke the strongest reaction.

None of that required wisdom. It required intelligence—the ability to model human behaviour and optimise for a target with extraordinary skill.

The target was engagement.

But engagement is not the same thing as human flourishing.

That is not a failure of intelligence. The engineering worked exactly as intended.

It may be a failure of wisdom.

A team can be intelligent enough to build almost anything.

The harder question is always the same:

Should we?

Consider a company

A company can look at its own operations today and ask a very intelligent question: how much of this work could AI do faster, cheaper, and without complaint?

Increasingly, the honest answer is: quite a lot of it.

A company can calculate exactly how many roles could be automated, and how much that would save this quarter.

But eliminating a job is not the same as eliminating the judgment, the institutional memory, and the human relationships that came with the person who held it.

A company can win the immediate calculation—lower costs, higher margins—while losing something much harder to measure: the people who understood why past decisions were made, who caught the mistakes a model would not have noticed, who knew a customer well enough to know when to bend a rule.

The question, again, is not simply:

Can we replace this?

It is:

What happens to the company after we do?

That is a question of wisdom, not intelligence.

The paradox of AI

This is where I think the AI revolution becomes particularly interesting.

For most of human history, intelligence has been scarce.

If you needed someone who could analyse a complex problem, calculate quickly, understand a difficult subject or generate ideas, you needed a human being with those capabilities.

AI is changing that equation.

Machines can already outperform humans in many narrow forms of intelligence. And increasingly capable AI systems may eventually outperform even the best humans across a much broader range of intellectual tasks.

If that happens, something profound changes.

Intelligence itself becomes less scarce.

And when intelligence becomes abundant, intelligence alone becomes less valuable.

What becomes more valuable?

Judgment.

Character.

Empathy.

Restraint.

Perspective.

The ability to understand consequences.

The courage to say no.

In other words:

Wisdom.

The danger is not artificial intelligence

Perhaps the greatest danger of AI is therefore not that machines become too intelligent.

It is that humans become increasingly capable of doing things without becoming equally capable of deciding what should be done.

Imagine giving an unwise person access to unlimited intelligence.

That does not necessarily produce better decisions.

It may simply produce more sophisticated bad decisions.

AI could make it easier to optimise the wrong objective.

Faster.

Cheaper.

At unprecedented scale.

That is a much more interesting—and much more frightening—possibility than the familiar story of machines taking over the world.

Because machines do not have to become evil for terrible things to happen.

They only have to become extraordinarily good at helping humans pursue the wrong goals.

Education has to change too

This has profound implications for education.

For generations, schools have focused on developing intelligence:

Learn more.

Remember more.

Calculate faster.

Solve harder problems.

Get better grades.

There was good reason for this. When intelligence was scarce, developing intelligence was one of the most valuable things education could do.

But what happens when machines can retrieve more information than a child, calculate faster, write more fluently and increasingly reason across a wider range of tasks?

Perhaps education needs to ask a different question.

Not only:

How intelligent can we make our children?

But:

What kind of human beings do we want them to become when intelligence is no longer scarce?

Children will still need intelligence. But they will also need judgment, empathy, courage, perspective and the wisdom to know when intelligence should—and should not—be used.

Artificial intelligence. Human wisdom.

The irony of the AI age is that the more intelligent our machines become, the more important our humanity may become.

We may eventually build machines that outperform us intellectually.

But a machine telling us what can be done does not relieve us of the responsibility to decide what should be done.

That responsibility remains ours.

So perhaps the real question is not:

Will AI become smarter than humans?

It probably will in many ways.

The more important question is:

Will human wisdom keep pace with human intelligence?

Because AI may make intelligence abundant.

It will not make wisdom abundant.

And perhaps that is the real challenge for education:

not simply to make children more intelligent, but to help them become wise enough to use intelligence well.

This question sits at the heart of ChildFirst.

We believe education must evolve as intelligence changes—not by choosing between human and artificial intelligence, but by developing children's human potential while teaching them to work intelligently with intelligent machines.

We call this Tri-Intelligence.

Explore the ChildFirst Philosophy →