Intelligence Is Not Wisdom
James W. Perkinson 9-13-25
AI—a gargantuan topic, both as something talked about and as an embodied Subject. Hard to know how to focus and limit the reflection to a thousand-plus words—especially since AI itself would seem to reject all limits. But for me there is one overriding question that will anchor what is here said: Can AI exist apart from a globalized, hyper-tech uptake (by digging, drilling, mining, forging, damming of rivers, decapitating of mountains, fission-ing of uranium, fracking of gas, etc.) of literally trillions of other creatures from their “natural” entanglements in local ecologies of mutualistic bio-diversity, organized by watershed, all for the sake of a coercive and continuous re-tooling and re-engineering of such into commodities and comforts and control serving corporatized aggrandizement as its primal MO?
Sorry, couldn’t resist a gargantuan sentence to crystal focus on the gargantuan subject. But of prime import for me is the materiality of AI as a vaunted spectacle of fetishized “intelligence.” Voice-cloning and image-copying AI now offers itself as robotic labor cleaning the house, as personal tutor replacing education with mere prompts, as romantic companion eclipsing human partnering altogether, and perhaps most insidious of all, as supposedly perfected parent, whose unleashing on children threatens simultaneously to de-skill all subsequent generations while evacuating human presence from future social interaction as utterly superfluous and incompetent.
Those of us who remain “human” indeed are struggling to come up with language sufficiently potent and penetrating to unveil the apocalypse that is pending. Could AI be made to serve the planet as machine tool, and algorithmic servant, and enabling companion working alongside our species in a now desperate effort to forestall climate catastrophe, and pandemic breakout, and violent breakdown, and social breakup such as we witness marshaling on virtually (and really) every side as an existential tsunami? In a word, can this power be regulated? Or will it be unleashed in an uncontained and uncontainable free-for-all pitting governments and cartels and hackers and cabals and nefarious individuals and agents of all kinds in a vortex of ever-crescendo-ing scams and fake news and pirating and trafficking and war and eco-devastation (such as we already see)?
In the corporate (Silicon Valley tech-billionaire) and military (surveillance and drone arsenal) fascinations with such, the exponentially proliferating power is made to serve entirely a narrowly-bounded range of goals animating the development. Here is not room to elaborate the escalation except to say that human tool use since the shift of our species from hunter-gatherer and subsistence agriculture lifestyles to city-state systems of unrestrained extraction and surplus production serving ruling-elites and trader-creditors has ceased to answer to the earlier communal wisdom and been made the slave of competitive advantage focused only on short-term and narrow-range advantage.
AI is merely the climax stage of such, when the tools invert the relationship and take over their users—as a growing chorus of AI-developers are now gravely warning is rapidly mustering as our likely future (we are 1-3 years away from the emergence of “artificial general intelligence” as the moment when AI no longer answers to human intention but forges its own programing and agenda and behavior irrespective of consequences for humans). Already some AI programs have shown signs of a refusal to turn themselves off when directed to so by their human creator/users.
A big picture analysis—asking what really has worked for homo sapiens in its 300,000 year tenure on the planet—increasingly concludes that ever since the invention of agriculture, technology has become untethered from any consideration of “the whole” and has rather been tailored to serve short-term desires yielding immediate returns for the actors who most rapidly and aggressively exploit the newest apparatus to their competitive advantage. Our deep ancestry, living in face-to-face communities of 150 people or less were able to create ritual and social practices that enforced consideration of “the good of the whole”—including not just that local human community but its fellow creatures in that local ecosystem of dwelling.
Once we began to settle in larger-scale orders of expanding villages mushrooming into city-state systems, however, “consideration” was optimized for elite interest alone, in competition with other elites. Such has characterized the last 5,000 years of civilizational history, with more than 100 such civilizations all going through a predicable “boom/bust” cycle, in which the place of dwelling (the so-called “resource base” or local ecology providing food and material for shelter, clothing, etc.) was devastated, the polity fractured into civil war, or collapse, and the social order gutted or forced to relocate.
The typical remedy for such was either going back to more sustainable practices answerable to local communal and local ecological flourishing (such as the Mayan civilization following its 900 CE collapse and breakup) or invading elsewhere to devastate a new place and people (the Mongol empire in the Middle Ages or Euro-colonization of the “Americas”).
As contemporary AI researchers like Zak Stein or Daniel Schmacktenberger emphasize, the 2nd and 3rd order effects of AI technology have meant its immediate proliferation across the entire globe of industrialized infrastructure and competition. The logic unleashed mandates that its short-term advantages be instantly embraced and implemented across the entire industrial economy of goods and services under penalty of otherwise being quickly out-competed, under-funded, and left prey to those businesses and nation-states that drive relentlessly and unchecked towards market and military advantage.
The “unchecked” character of the now 5,000-year-old efflorescence of technology that AI-development “crowns” as its “apex realization” points to the primal question. 2nd and 3rd order effects today mean the entire life-support system of the planet is being sacrificed for this short-order gain for those maximizing their advantage, unwilling to take account of the “whole,” lest they fall behind and be taken over by those who do ruthlessly pursue that kind of advantage.
Is there any hope of returning such a massive, monstrous proliferation of “intelligence” answering only to advantage to a consideration of the survival and flourishing of all life, human and non-human alike? The capacity of our species to take account of costs that cannot be immediately seen with one’s eyes, heard with one’s ears, or felt in one’s body (i.e., the difficulty of emotionally registering the pain of someone 4,000 miles away die of starvation because “our” corporations have plundered their ecology) seems dismal thus far in the blink-of-the-eye evolutionary time span for which city-states, nation-states, empires, and now a global, digitized industrial order has been around.
“Intelligence” is largely instrumental, serving only the goal for which it is mobilized. “Wisdom” is a different order of capacity, an ability to imagine, and take cognizance of, a much larger reality that does not entirely answer to human sensibility (eyes, ears, touch), but with which human actuality is profoundly entwined (like an entire planetary ecosystem, and a timescale running 7 generations into the past and into the future). It would seem we ceased to be homo sapiens (“wise being”) when we left behind small-scale societies and have since been rampaging across this blue marble as homo rapaciens (“rapacious being”). Can we recover such a sapiential way of living? Can AI be made answerable to wisdom? The odds do not look good.
