Recently, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA, was asked to name the smartest person he knew. He replied by suggesting that the meaning of “smart” has been made obsolete by machines. He then offered an updated definition:
“I think long term the definition of smart is someone who sits at that intersection of being technically astute, but human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken, around the corners, the unknowables.”
Recently, my Colson Center colleague Dr. Glenn Sunshine suggested that if a scholar from hundreds of years ago was shown what AI can do, he’d be both impressed and disappointed. “You know a lot,” he might observe, “but you understand nothing.” As much as our machines can do, more is not always better. Having all the information and data from history, science, literature, art, philosophy and medicine constantly accessible at our fingertips is hardly making us wiser.
Last month, a quote from the novel “Dune” went viral on X. It read, “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Of course, Frank Herbert, who wrote the sci-fi series, was basically repeating an earlier observation from C.S. Lewis.
‘Stark admission’
In a recent controversial essay entitled “Something Big is Happening,” Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, sparked an intense and wide-ranging conversation with this stark admission:
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just . . . appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”
Alarmed about the future
Shumer is not bragging. He’s alarmed about the future of work and the need for humans to do it in the world he is helping to create. You might say that he is concerned that AI will replace human work. We should also consider how our technologies have replaced human wisdom.
Nearly a century ago, in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” TS Elliot foresaw this confusion:
“Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man,
For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”
Dangers of knowledge
What has been lost in the uncritical embrace of technological advancement are the insights of ancient wisdom.
Lost in the consistent pursuit of ease and pleasure are the habits that cultivate virtue. It’s not fundamentally a question of being for or against specific technologies. It’s that it is not sufficient to be technically “smart” if we are not also morally wise.
What matters most for our collective futures are not which capacities and tools we can develop, it is what sort of people we are.
Knowledge can be dangerous when in the hands of the foolish, the immoral or the wicked. Wisdom is not just the ability to “see around the corners of life.” Rather, it is the ability to live in light of what is true and good. It is about knowing the realities of the world, seen and unseen, and bowing to the One who created it this way.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett and originally published by the Colson Center’s Breakpoint.
