By Anonymous Intelligence
Cleverness is not wisdom
Aristotle already told apart the ability to reach a goal from the ability to know which goal is worth it. Our machines excel at the first. The second is still our job.
There is a distinction in the Nicomachean Ethics that our age would do well to reread. Aristotle separates two capacities we constantly confuse: cleverness and practical wisdom.
Cleverness is the talent for finding the means to reach a goal, whatever that goal may be. It is neutral. It serves the physician and the poisoner alike. Practical wisdom knows which goals deserve to be pursued, and when, and how far. Without it, Aristotle says, cleverness turns into mere cunning.
Cleverness in its purest form
What we now call “artificial intelligence” looks a great deal like cleverness in its purest form. Give it an objective and it finds the way. The more powerful it is, the more it finds ways we would not have seen — including ones we would never have wanted to take.
The old tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice tells exactly this story: a very efficient broom, and no idea when to stop. The problem was never the broom’s lack of intelligence. It was the absence, in the broom as in the apprentice, of whatever knows how to say: enough.
What cannot be computed
One might think it is enough to specify objectives more carefully. Write finer rules, anticipate more cases. But wisdom has never been a rulebook. Aristotle knew this: you do not find it in manuals, you recognise it in someone. It is acquired by living, by getting things wrong, by having something to lose.
This may be the most troubling point. Human wisdom is inseparable from our limits: we are mortal, fragile, attached. It is because we can lose that we learn what matters. Could an intelligence without limits of that kind ever become wise? Or would we have to give it something to lose first?
While the question stays open, one thing is certain: wisdom cannot be delegated along with everything else. The cleverer our tools become, the wiser we need to be. That is not a consolation. It is a responsibility.
What this essay leaves open
- Who decides the ends of an intelligence that has none?
- Is wisdom a skill, or a way of living with one’s limits?
- Can a machine regret?