Wisdom/Wisdom, Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence

What are the relationships among wisdom, biological intelligence, and artificial intelligence?

Human intelligence remains a useful, yet controversial topic. It can be helpful to distinguish among types of intelligences, levels of intelligence, and instruments often used for measuring intelligence.



Begin by thinking of two largely independent dimensions of intelligence, horizontal and vertical. The theory of multiple intelligences describes a horizontal dimension of intelligence. This theory recognizes that some people are good at math, and others are good at singing. Specifically, the theory identifies musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, naturalistic, intrapersonal, and visual-spatial intelligences. Other abilities have been suggested.

Vertical dimensions of intelligence can be usefully compared by staying within one of the horizontal columns. For example, we can confidently state that Luciano Pavarotti was a better singer than Albert Einstein, and that Einstein was better at mathematics that Pavarotti.

We invite controversy, however, by claiming that because Einstein is better at math than Pavarotti, he is somehow a better person than Pavarotti. We boldly interject value judgements when we make comparisons across horizontal dimensions of intelligences. It is also important to recognize that a score on any assessment instrument is only an approximate surrogate for some limited dimensions of intelligence.

We can begin to compare the performance of various Artificial Intelligence systems to that of humans on various instruments used to assess intelligence. For example, GPT-4 demonstrated impressive aptitude on several standardized tests. Remarkable, it achieved a score of 1410 on the SAT, placing it in the 94th percentile of humans who took the same test. ChatGPT is particularly good with verbal-linguistic skills; I often use it to improve my writing, as in this essay on good writing. WolframAlpha is especially good at performing logical-mathematical tasks.

The distinguishing characteristic of Wisdom is a primary motivation toward the good. When a wise person becomes more intelligent, they can become wiser and accomplish more good. However, when a maliciously motivated person becomes more intelligent, they can become more devious and cause more mayhem and misery. Wisdom requires a moral orientation toward the good that can be lacking in both human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Humans who exhibit antisocial behavior are often described as psychopaths. The AI alignment problem describes the difficulty in aligning the goals of Artificial intelligence devices with pro-social values.

Intelligence and wisdom are components of a vector having both magnitude and direction. Intelligence contributes to the magnitude of the vector and wisdom establishes the direction. Wise vectors point toward the good, regardless of the magnitude.

In summary, it is wise to couple both human intelligence and Artificial intelligence with an orientation toward the good.