The Problem Isn’t That We’re Not Smart Enough

There is a question underneath nearly every problem I find myself interested in lately.

Not What can we do?

Not even What do we know?

But:

Are we mature enough to handle what we know?

That question has been rattling around in my head after watching The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a new documentary about artificial intelligence and the very human question of what kind of world we are building for the people who come after us.

Among the voices in the film is Tristan Harris, the former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. His observation stopped me:

If we can become the wisest and most mature version of ourselves, perhaps there is a way through.

I keep coming back to that.

Because maybe the central problem of the human species has never actually been a lack of intelligence.

We are absurdly intelligent.

We split the atom.

We mapped the human genome.

We put people on the Moon.

We built artificial intelligence capable of generating language, images, music, code, and increasingly sophisticated reasoning.

And apparently, having accomplished all of that, we are still struggling with the ancient human challenges of greed, tribalism, ego, violence, envy, impulsivity, power, and the inability to admit when we might be wrong.

So perhaps intelligence isn't the finish line.

Perhaps maturity is.

We Have Been Trying to Figure This Out for a Very Long Time

One of my favorite things about studying philosophy is realizing how often we behave as though humanity just invented thinking.

We didn't.

Long before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle became the household names of Western philosophy, there were thinkers asking enormous questions about existence, nature, mathematics, knowledge, reality, and the structure of the universe.

Thales.

Heraclitus.

Pythagoras.

Parmenides.

Zeno.

Anaximander.

Anaxagoras.

Leucippus.

Democritus.

They didn't have smartphones. They didn't have particle accelerators. They didn't have ChatGPT.

And yet they were already doing something remarkably familiar:

They were trying to understand the world rather than merely react to it.

Some of their ideas turned out to be wrong. Some were astonishingly prescient. Some would not be fully appreciated for thousands of years.

But that isn't really the point.

The point is that the human project of figuring shit out is ancient.

And so is the realization that figuring shit out takes work.

The Pre-Socratics weren't famous because they found a life hack.

They weren't trying to become more efficient consumers of information.

They were not speed-running philosophy.

They were thinking.

Slowly.

Seriously.

Sometimes obsessively.

And they were willing to sit inside questions that did not have immediate answers.

That matters.

Because we have built an entire culture around avoiding exactly that.

We Have Confused Speed With Progress

Ryan Holiday makes a similar argument about reading.

People constantly ask about reading faster.

How can I get through more books?

How can I increase my words-per-minute?

Can I listen at 2x speed?

What if I use an app that flashes the words at me?

And Holiday's answer, essentially, is:

You're missing the point.

The goal isn't to finish books.

The goal is to be changed by them.

Great readers don't necessarily read quickly. They read deliberately. They pay attention. They underline things. They write in margins. They copy passages into notebooks. They stop when something catches them.

They wrestle with ideas.

And that takes time.

There is no hack for wisdom.

There is no shortcut around thinking.

There is no productivity app that can do the uncomfortable part for you.

Holiday tells the story of a student who asks a master how long mastery will take.

Ten years, the master says.

The student wants to know how to make it faster.

Thirty years.

The student insists he will work harder and do whatever it takes to accelerate the process.

Seventy years.

The lesson is brutal and beautiful:

The student in a hurry learns the slowest.

Because the point isn't merely acquiring information.

The point is becoming the kind of person who can use it.

Information Is Not Wisdom

This distinction might be one of the most important distinctions of our time.

We have more information available to us than any humans who have ever lived.

And yet information overload has not magically transformed us into wise people.

Quite the opposite.

We can now encounter ten thousand opinions before breakfast.

We can ask a machine to summarize a book we haven't read.

We can watch a three-minute video explaining a philosophical concept that took someone forty years to understand.

We can consume a lifetime's worth of historical information while standing in line at Starbucks.

And then we wonder why we don't feel any wiser.

Because information is not wisdom.

Knowing something happened is not the same as understanding why it happened.

Knowing what someone said is not the same as understanding what they meant.

Knowing a fact is not the same as knowing what to do with it.

And knowing how to build something is certainly not the same as knowing whether we should build it.

That last distinction becomes particularly uncomfortable when we talk about artificial intelligence.

The Machine May Get Smarter. That Doesn't Mean We Do.

This is where The AI Doc gets especially interesting.

The question surrounding AI isn't simply whether machines will become more intelligent.

They probably will.

The more interesting question is what happens when increasingly powerful tools are placed in the hands of humans who remain, fundamentally, human.

Humans with egos.

Humans with incentives.

Humans who want money.

Humans who want power.

Humans who become frightened.

Humans who form tribes.

Humans who lie.

Humans who misunderstand.

Humans who make mistakes and then desperately defend those mistakes because admitting them would damage their identity.

In other words:

Us.

AI doesn't eliminate the ancient human problem.

It magnifies it.

A mature person with a powerful tool can potentially do extraordinary things.

An immature person with a powerful tool can potentially do extraordinary damage.

And suddenly the ancient philosophers become relevant again.

Not because Heraclitus had an opinion about artificial intelligence.

He obviously didn't.

But because the underlying problem hasn't changed.

What kind of human being are you becoming?

The Ancient Philosophers Had a Word for This

The Stoics would later make this question central to philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius wasn't writing Meditations because he needed better productivity hacks.

Epictetus wasn't teaching people how to optimize their morning routines.

Seneca wasn't trying to help wealthy Romans become more efficient executives.

They were wrestling with something much more difficult:

How should a human being live?

What is within our control?

What isn't?

What do we owe other people?

How should we respond when we are insulted?

What happens when we get what we want?

What happens when we don't?

How do we govern ourselves before we attempt to govern anything else?

And perhaps most importantly:

How do we become better than we were yesterday?

That is a very different definition of self-improvement.

It isn't about becoming richer.

Or more productive.

Or more impressive.

Or more influential.

It is about becoming more capable of being human.

More patient.

More discerning.

More courageous.

More intellectually honest.

More capable of changing our minds.

More capable of sitting with uncertainty.

More capable of recognizing our own bullshit.

More capable of resisting the immediate impulse in favor of the wiser response.

That is maturity.

And it is a lifelong project.

Maybe Growing Up Isn't the Same Thing as Maturing

Here's the uncomfortable part.

We assume maturity happens automatically.

You get older.

You pay bills.

You get a job.

Maybe you get married.

Maybe you have children.

You acquire responsibilities.

You develop wrinkles.

Congratulations.

You're an adult.

But age and maturity are not synonyms.

A person can be sixty years old and still be emotionally governed by the same insecurities they had at sixteen.

A person can hold an advanced degree and remain intellectually incapable of admitting they are wrong.

A person can run a multinational corporation and have absolutely no idea how to govern their own impulses.

A person can possess extraordinary intelligence and remarkably little wisdom.

We have confused development with maturation.

They are not the same thing.

Maturation requires intentionality.

It requires reflection.

It requires exposure to ideas that make us uncomfortable.

It requires learning from people who disagree with us.

It requires reading things slowly enough to actually understand them.

It requires history.

It requires philosophy.

It requires conversation.

It requires failure.

And, perhaps most importantly, it requires the humility to realize that we are unfinished.

This Is Why Reading Matters

This is also why I get so irritated when reading is reduced to a competition.

How many books did you read this year?

Twenty?

Fifty?

One hundred?

Fantastic.

But what happened inside you?

Did you change your mind?

Did you notice a blind spot?

Did you become more compassionate?

More skeptical?

More curious?

Did you encounter an argument so good that it forced you to reconsider something you'd believed for twenty years?

Did you learn something you actually used?

Because that's the point.

The purpose of reading isn't to decorate your Goodreads account.

It isn't to make you sound intelligent at dinner.

It isn't to accumulate little intellectual trophies.

Reading is one of the oldest technologies humans have for transferring experience across generations.

Someone can spend forty years thinking about a problem and then hand you the distilled remains of those forty years in a book.

You can sit on your couch and have a conversation with someone who died centuries ago.

You can borrow another person's eyes.

You can inhabit another person's century.

You can encounter a culture that doesn't exist anymore.

You can discover that an assumption you considered universal was actually just something you were taught.

That isn't entertainment.

That's an extraordinary human technology.

And it takes time.

Perhaps the Most Revolutionary Thing We Can Do Is Become More Human

This is where all three threads come together for me.

The ancient philosophers.

The great readers.

The Stoics.

The people wrestling with artificial intelligence.

They are all asking versions of the same question:

What are human beings capable of becoming?

And maybe the answer depends less on how intelligent we become than on whether our wisdom can keep pace with our capabilities.

Because humanity is very good at building bigger hammers.

We are considerably less accomplished at deciding when not to swing them.

We can make information move faster than ever.

But can we learn to think more carefully?

We can make machines increasingly intelligent.

But can we become wiser?

We can automate decisions.

But can we become more responsible for the decisions we make?

We can access nearly every book ever written.

But can we sit still long enough to let one change us?

These aren't technological questions.

They're human questions.

And they are ancient.

The Work Is the Point

I think this is ultimately what I love about philosophy.

It doesn't promise that you will arrive.

It gives you better questions for the journey.

The Pre-Socratics questioned the nature of reality.

Socrates questioned assumptions.

Plato questioned justice and knowledge.

Aristotle questioned virtually everything.

The Stoics questioned our relationship with control, suffering, desire, responsibility, and virtue.

Great readers continue the conversation.

And now, as artificial intelligence accelerates the capabilities of the species, we are being handed an even larger version of the same challenge.

Can we grow into what we have created?

Maybe that is the real definition of progress.

Not simply that we can do more.

But that we become wise enough to know what deserves to be done.

Not simply that we become smarter.

But that we become mature enough to use our intelligence responsibly.

Not simply that we live longer.

But that we learn how to live better.

There are no shortcuts.

There never were.

The work is reading.

The work is thinking.

The work is questioning.

The work is listening.

The work is changing.

The work is becoming.

And perhaps the most important work any of us will ever do is the work of becoming the most mature version of ourselves.

Because the future isn't ultimately going to be shaped by how intelligent humanity becomes.

It will be shaped by what humanity does with its intelligence.

And that, my friends, is an ancient question.

We are simply living in a moment when the answer matters more than ever.

Knowledge is power. Context is everything. Perception is reality.