We hear a lot these days about Artificial Intelligence, and, in fact, AI is already here. Post on eBay, and the site’s AI feature will write a grammatically flawless and persuasive description that only needs tweaking. Meanwhile, the full potential of AI looms menacingly in the distance, with the possibilities scaring European leaders enough that some have called for legislation to regulate what they view as a threat to the very stability of society. For alarmists, a dystopia not unlike The Matrix lurks just around the corner.

Despite the spotlight on AI, it is worth nothing that no one seems to be suggesting Artificial Wisdom (AW). This total lack of interest in AW is not too surprising, however, if you stop to consider how little time modern people spend aspiring to wisdom—a quality which once enjoyed a lofty position in the hierarchy of virtues. Of course, we do not know if Artificial Wisdom would even be feasible, if humanity ever did decide to explore the possibility. All of which begs the question, “What is wisdom, exactly, and how does it differ from intelligence?”.

Wisdom Versus Intelligence

The Cambridge Dictionary online defines wisdom as “the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgements”. This definition does not bode well for the creation of a wisdom correlate to AI: the possessive pronoun your intimates a living, breathing human being, while the caveat of experience might be understood to exclude a computer sitting in a building. If we accept these basic parameters, then wisdom is exclusively human, the product of living life, and one which a computer would not be able to replicate.

On the other hand, one might ask, “if AI has the ability to learn (one of the defining characteristics of Artificial Intelligence), does that not suggest the use of experience to improve the process of decision making?” It is a fair question. And, yet, the odds appear stacked against AI’s becoming wise, just as we cannot expect that solving a tough problem in math will confer wisdom on the mathematician.

What the Wise Say About Wisdom

Wisdom is not the product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it. —Albert Einstein

Wisdom is the power to put our time and knowledge to the proper use. —Thomas Jefferson.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. —Issac Asimov

These quotations from three great thinkers round out the dictionary definition by concluding that wisdom is, indeed, the product of our lived experience, and that wisdom must also lead to appropriate, or righteous, action. While not stated explicitly, experience denotes the consequences of a lifetime of decisions, the product of learning lessons in the school of hard knocks. Wisdom apparently demands skin in the game, feeling the joy of our good decisions and suffering the pain of our bad ones. In other words, emotional investment is a prerequisite for wisdom—bad news for any AI which might strive to become wise. AI may correct mistakes, but it cannot feel personally (emphasis on person) responsible for its errors.

Jefferson and others also posit that wisdom presupposes a sense of right and wrong. Certainly, a programmer can provide AI with a set of ethical rules and expect that AI will exactly adhere to those programmed mandates. But making the right choice, the ethical choice, cannot always be determined by using a rubric and needs to be performed on an ad hoc basis. Deciding whether something is right or wrong depends on multiple variables and, once again, comes back to compassion for the other human beings who will shoulder the consequences of the decisions which we make. Ultimately, the process requires a person who can envision himself or herself in someone else’s shoes—something a device or system, no matter how advanced, cannot do.

The Manhattan Project

This year Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer, a retelling of the important story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s journey to develop the atomic bomb, is set to sweep the Oscar’s. The movie chooses to focus on Oppenheimer as its protagonist, but it tells the bigger story of a team of extraordinary minds, arguably the greatest think tank ever assembled, that produced an invention so terrible that it hangs ominously like the sword of Damocles over humanity even today. In our current advanced computer age, the creation of a first atomic bomb would probably be aided by AI, but the decision of whether or not, and how and when, to use it, would be just as problematic in 2024 as it was back in 1945. As the rational scientists who created the A-bomb discovered, the somber prospect of detonating atomic bombs in cities teeming with people would preclude dispassionate problem-solving.

In the spring of 1945, Leo Szilárd, a Hungarian-American physicist, delivered a letter to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes. Signed by 70 prominent scientists involved in designing the atomic bomb, the missive encouraged the President to inform Japan of its intention to use the new weapon, allowing them a chance to surrender. In their eloquent letter, the authors even foresaw the future Cold War and the potential impact of the bomb not only on the Japanese, but on all human beings in perpetuity, writing

Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

Since Secretary of State Byrnes, who paid little attention to experts from the State Department and would later be accused by Truman of trying to set White House foreign policy, decided not to pass the letter on to the Oval Office, the President never heard the scientists’ plea. In August of the year the letter was written, two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 130,000 to 230,000 people in an inconceivable storm of annihilation.

Today, the letter, dubbed the Szilárd Petition by historians, rests in the National Archives, immortalizing the thoughts and opinions of some of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century. It is not, however, a testament to their intelligence, but, rather, proof of their collective wisdom. Szilárd himself, along with his colleague Wigner, another signatory on the letter—both Jews who left Germany just as the Nazis had begun rising to terrifying power—understood all too well the suffering humanity is capable of inflicting on itself. Their learned experience, and the cumulative learned experience of the other 68 people who drafted the letter, afforded them the human compassion to try to change the trajectory of human history. Due to the actions of a hawkish Secretary of State, however, what might have happened if Truman had actually heard the plaintive case of those who invented the nuclear bomb, will never be known.

Whether or not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th of 1945 were right or wrong continues to be discussed to this day, a lively debate centered mainly around the question of how necessary the atom bombs were to end the war. Nevertheless, the compassion, and morality, of the team of scientists who drafted the Szilárd Petition are beyond dispute, and, today, the letter, fragile and yellowed with age, endures as a courageous act of human, and deeply humane, wisdom. It is an accomplishment that no Artificial Intelligence, regardless of its sophistication, could ever endeavor to achieve, as computers may have CPUs, but only human beings are gifted with the human heart.