The Way of Wisdom

I'm grateful for having the opportunity to write in this blog every week. It may seem like an insignificant thing but writing is like exercise to me. It helps keep the mind fit. And a fit mind is always sharp, alert and wise.

The wise part needs a bit of elaborating. We know how to acquire knowledge. We read books, watch Youtube videos or attend courses. We gather a lot of information and assimilate them with whatever we know. But when does knowledge become wisdom? What is wisdom?

A striker who knows how to anticipate when his team-mate is going to make a through-pass to him and times his run just in time to beat the offside trap has a kind of wisdom--an intuitive knowing that comes without thinking. It's the result of having played a huge number of matches, the ability to sense the weight and trajectory of a pass and knowing how each and every individual player habits are and then processing all of these information in a fraction of a second, intuitively. 

Wisdom comes from having a honed model inside the head and body, the kind that AI has, trained by billions of pieces of information; and when a new set of data arrives, you have the model to generate the predicted output. Wisdom is not the if-then-else type of thinking. That's brute-force logic and intelligence. Wisdom is taking an input and passing information through the neural network to generate an output. We don't exactly know how we derive the answer but we do know that every bit of information that we had digested before, contributed to that instantaneous answer.

Am I being over-the-top now by saying that AI actually has wisdom? Well, not the kind we have...yet. But it's the same process. Instantaneous knowing and having an immediate feel of a situation--this is what we normally call experience. Experience is nothing more than training data. The more we have the better the model.

Can two persons exposed to the same knowledge and experience acquire the same wisdom? No, because no two persons start with the same initial conditions. Genes determine the type of brain and body we have. Our individual learning machineries are wired differently. Knowing what you are good at, and allowing yourselves to be trained in the field and subject that you have an aptitude for, certainly helps.

That is why I think work is good. The more data you process, the better your intelligence model is.  Or shall I say, wisdom model? Wisdom is simply intellectual instinct. Our anthropocentric bias makes us believe that machines can never be conscious and there's that magical quality in humans called consciousness and wisdom that will forever be elusive from them. But think again, AI is making us understand ourselves better. Maybe we are just like them, with the added benefit of locomotion, having more sensors and a life-time of data?

I have no qualms about sharing this planet with machines who will become wiser than us. Maybe at some point we could be expendable to them. But that again is an anthropocentrism that anyone with wisdom shall be able to transcend.