Abstract
This chapter identifies three challenges to human wisdom posed by ongoing advances in robotics, machine learning, and computer automation. Building upon an account of wisdom as moral or intellectual expertise enriched by the habit of responsible self-regulation in the light of holistic value judgments, I note that in many future labor contexts, machine expertise, or the semblance of it, will appear to be an increasingly expedient and attractive substitute for human expertise and wisdom. Moreover, existing technical, political, and economic conditions may well disrupt the historical pattern in which automation eventually creates new and enriched domains for the cultivation of human expertise and wisdom. I conclude that unless we challenge these conditions and assume responsibility for their effects, we risk wasting the vast positive potential of artificial intelligence and automation, which lies in their only acceptable use: namely, enlisting their power in the full support of our own moral and intellectual perfectibility, in the service of the growth of human wisdom for the benefit of ourselves and those who share our world.
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Notes
- 1.
While contested, the likelihood of an automation-driven “end of work” has been a hot topic in media and scholarly circles since Rifkin (1995); more recently, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014), Ford (2015) and Kaplan (2015) have explored this prospect in the light of new advances in robotics and artificial intelligence.
- 2.
This is much like what Aristotle in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics called continence (enkrateia), the habitual restraint of one’s vices. Ideally, continence facilitates the later emergence of a superior moral state of temperance (sophrosune), in which these psychological obstacles have been largely swept away by the habit of virtuous activity. While Aristotle seems to think that the noble person of practical wisdom will be temperate rather than merely continent, it is probably reasonable to set a lower standard of continence if we wish the term ‘wise’ to describe anyone but a few moral saints among us.
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Vallor, S. (2017). AI and the Automation of Wisdom. In: Powers, T. (eds) Philosophy and Computing. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61043-6_8
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