Opt In!

In front of an oversold crowd in DC, we recently launched our sister publication Persona with a major interview with Francis Fukuyama.

Wisdom of Crowds subscribers have formed such a significant, lively community over the years and we are offering a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version of Persona as a note of our gratitude.

Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store. Persona will continue with the Wisdom of Crowds tradition of feisty first principle disagreement—litigating major issues about technology, society and what it means to be human in our new age of AI gods and demons.

Much more ahead. Click to be part of it!

Accept Your Persona Subscription Here!

A Note from the Editors: Today at our new sister publication, Persona, our friend Osita Nwanevu — journalist, author of national bestseller The Right of the People, and one of the sharpest observers of the new politics of our digital age — exposes the philosophical question at the heart of our ongoing “techlash.”

Below is a sample. Want more? Subscribe to Persona! Wisdom of Crowds subscribers can enjoy a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version — just click.

Subscribe to Persona

It has been a commonplace for most of the last 20 years of punditry in this country that the American people are hopelessly, perilously divided ⁠— incapable of finding common ground, not only on policy or values, but on basic facts. Polarization, it’s been said, has cleaved us apart into functionally separate societies and separate realities. We’re as unlikely to seek out friends or partners we disagree with as we are to vote for candidates of the opposing party; the only truths we are willing to embrace are the ones that come from the authorities least likely to proffer truths that discomfit us.

This reading of the American political situation has always elided important questions: whether it is actually wrong or a mark of inferior intelligence to have partners and confidants who generally share your political principles; whether it is actually the case that the American people are more divided than ever, given the violent sectarian conflict that has marked much of American political history; whether the American people might be divided not only or even primarily because they have been bamboozled by demagogues and populists, but because the challenges facing the country are existential, and deep divisions over how we might understand and address them are warranted and likely inevitable. Nonetheless, all those who inveigh daily against political tribalism are right to say that much of American life today ⁠— perhaps too much ⁠— happens along a deep and seemingly unbridgeable fault line. Americans who have invested themselves in politics and political causes do not trust or understand each other, often despise each other, and cannot agree on any significant issues.

Any significant issues, that is, except for one. Over the last few years, the development of artificial intelligence has become the defining issue of our time. On its present trajectory, even if Silicon Valley’s most outlandish predictions, positive or negative, don’t come to pass, the development of artificial intelligence may become one of the defining issues of all time.

For more . . .

Subscribe to Persona

You probably forgot about Barack Obama’s 2006 speech on faith and politics. I did too. It feels of a different time, one that is no longer relevant. In my new book with the Evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk — Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life — we talk about the beforetimes as follows:

Watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debate taxes and health-care policy before the 2012 presidential election, Americans didn’t realize how lucky they were. The relative staidness of US politics was a historical aberration. The natural state of politics is much more tribal and apocalyptic, as we would soon find out. The conflicts in Europe and the Middle East foretold what was coming for American shores.

In some ways, Obama’s address as a then candidate for president was well ahead of its time. This was before the Democratic Party had undergone its full secularization, becoming — or seeming to become — largely inhospitable to people and communities of faith.

But Obama sensed, then, that his party was conceding too much religious ground to conservatives and that progressives needed to find ways to speak with moral conviction and authority. In this effort, religion was an ally, just as it was for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln when they exhorted Americans to aspire to something greater beyond themselves.

Obama spoke of the loneliness crisis before we recognized it as such:

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds — dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets — and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough… They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before.

Democrats had a tendency towards what I’ve called in the past “what works-ism” — that merely resorting to technocratic appeals could be enough to persuade. But it wasn’t enough to provide people with charts and data telling them that one policy or another worked better. Because human beings aren’t rational automatons who carefully consider different policy proposals side-by-side and then choose accordingly. Our policy differences aren’t just policy differences, they are rooted in something deeper. They are often rooted in what we at Wisdom of Crowds like to call “first principles.”

Again, Obama seemed to understand this emotional, existential tenor of politics:

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.

Interestingly, Obama acknowledged that all law is a moral proposition:

So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When progressives rail at conservatives for “legislating morality,” they neglect the fact that they, too, legislate morality.

But Obama, being the good liberal he was and is, still seemed in thrall to the liberal Rawlsian consensus. John Rawls, probably the most influential liberal philosopher of the 20th century, famously argued that religious people with “comprehensive doctrines” can be as religious as they like with one important caveat: when they enter the public, political arena, they must speak translate and edit their religious convictions in ways that would be intelligible to non-religious people.

Obama again:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Here, Obama appears to be creating a dichotomy between religion and reason. Secular arguments are reasonable. Religious arguments are not. But, of course, when liberals make public arguments, they are operating with a set of background liberal assumptions, and no one expects them to do otherwise. Liberalism isn’t quite a religion, but it is an ideological orientation. It is not neutral, because no politics is neutral.

Get 14 day free trial

The election of Donald Trump marked the end of this illusion of neutrality. It became clear that our divides were not amenable to mere reason or “rational” debate. It wouldn’t be possible to argue or persuade our way to a better politics. The post-ideological age that Obama gestured towards was, in fact, the last gasp of an old, outmoded way of viewing politics. Just as Egyptians and Tunisians were during the Arab Spring, Americans found themselves animated by fundamentally divergent conceptions of the Good. The question was no longer “what works?” The question was “who are we?” Our public life, in the Trumpian age, would become transformed into a battle over not politics but the starting assumptions of politics.

Even the fact that Obama gave his 2006 speech was itself evidence of a kind of odd hope: that words themselves could create something resembling unity or consensus, when of course they couldn’t. And they didn’t.

Pre-order Shadi's book — 40% discount

Share

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Leave a comment

A Note from the Editors: Courtesy of our new sister publication, Persona, we’re excited to preview this conversation between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Kimbriel, which took place last Friday in Washington, D.C.

Frank and Sam debate human nature — what is it? is it real? how do we know? — and its connection to the good society and the good life. You can watch the first few minutes here. For access to the full video, visit Persona!

(Reminder: We’ve given all Wisdom of Crowds subscribers a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version of Persona. Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store!)

A Note from the Editors: Last Friday, a sold-out crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., to launch Persona, our new sister publication dedicated to exploring the good society and the good life in our dawning technological age.

If you weren’t there, you don’t have to miss out! We’ve given all Wisdom of Crowds subscribers a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version of Persona. Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store.

Persona brings everything you love about Wisdom of Crowds to the most urgent, most important questions of our time.

Much more ahead. Click to be part of it!

Accept Your Persona Subscription Here!

A Note from the Editors: Wisdom of Crowds has always been running on two levels. One is talking about ideas, engaging with them, with a kind of common-sense curiosity, and probing exactly why it is we believe what we believe.

And the other is the ideas themselves — getting deep thinkers to explore the contours of politics, society and technology.

We are excited today to announce that we are spinning out our first sister publication — Persona — which will be devoted to just this kind of enterprise: exploring deep ideas about society, humanity and the good life.

None of that is to say that ideas and contestation are somehow going away at Wisdom of Crowds. Quite the opposite. We have a lot of things cooking in this increasingly unbalanced moment in our politics and society. But Persona is a different approach to that contestation — a ground where ideas confront each other, and test the frontier of how we can build a better world.

Samuel Kimbriel will stay with us as in-house philosophical annoyance and editor at large, as well as serving as publisher for the new publication.

We’re celebrating the launch of Persona tonight in Washington D.C. at a special event with our friend Francis Fukuyama. We hope you’ve signed up and we’ll see some of you there.

In celebration of the occasion, we are gifting all Wisdom of Crowds subscribers a year subscription to the paid version of Persona. Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store.

Exciting times ahead!

Damir & Shadi

Subscribe to Persona

It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open . . .

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

One of the first effects of our strange, new technological age has been to shine a stark light back on our assumptions about humanity.

Last year, the Effective Altruist–aligned website Forethought published an essay entitled, “Human Takeover Might Be Worse Than AI Takeover.” Author Tom Davidson argues that AI is likely to create significant power centralization, and that under those circumstances we should prefer rule by AI to rule by human beings. “Humans,” he writes “don’t come close to living up to our moral standards.” In fact, we have ample evidence that humans are conditioned “by evolution for being selfish.” By contrast, current AI tends to be “nice and ethical . . . humble, open-minded, cooperative, and kind.” AI might, in fact, promote a world more moral and more rational than any we have enjoyed so far.

This loss of confidence in our own species intensifies a trend that began before the emergence of LLMs. The post-World War II generation soberly embraced ideas of universal rights and humanity’s intrinsic worth, developing everything from the global asylum system to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But subsequent generations, removed from the memories of global war, found these universal convictions harder and harder to sustain. In recent decades, we have seen escalating political and cultural crises regarding how we ought to live together, indeed what it means to be human at all. We have found it difficult to mount arguments even for fairly minimal claims like “human dignity.”

As AI has emerged, prominent figures from Larry Page to Elon Musk have become attracted to the idea that our digital creations may soon resolve the great problems of humanity . . . by leaving us behind. Perhaps AI can be rational where we have been headstrong and rash. Perhaps it can achieve objectivity and moral consistency where we have been uncertain, manipulative, and hypocritical. Perhaps it can simply resolve the problems of physics, mathematics, and morality in a single bound.

As one prominent post-humanist declares: “the great (and ultimately, only) moral aim of AGI should be the creation of Worthy Successor — an entity with more capability, intelligence, ability to survive, and (subsequently) moral value than all of humanity.”

Subscribe to Persona

Every time I encounter these views, I am struck by the way that their apparent boldness conceals a kind of intellectual sogginess. Such arguments seem highly incurious about their own philosophical premises, or about what we — humanity — are and have been.

Many contemporary arguments about technology share this tendency. The AI safety community, for example, has focused its efforts for more than a decade on the idea of “alignment.” OpenAI’s safety statement says that it aims “to eliminate misalignment,” defined as any situation in which “AI’s behavior or actions are not in line with relevant human values, instructions, goals, or intent.”

But as soon as one begins to think about alignment, one realizes how thin the proposal is. Aligned to what? To whom?

“Humanity” in these invocations is an empty abstraction. Human history has been one long — often violent — disagreement about precisely this issue: What are we? How should we live? What should we value?

Questions of human history — and human nature — are anything but philosophically shallow. It is not merely that humanity is difficult to make sense of, but that reality is. What is real? What is good? What does it mean to exist at all? Nor are these questions the sort of thing that will be settled dispositively by some boost to IQ. (Reality isn’t “just math.”)

Our history has been turbulent precisely because these questions are so consequential. And we have developed countless traditions, many centuries- or millennia-long, to by which we negotiate them. Ancient Mesopotamian death rituals, Buddhist disciplines of detachment, Epicurean feasting, Talmudic debate, modern scientific experimentation — all are modes of response to our confrontation with reality. Our entire history is a history of being forced to face the philosophical texture of reality directly — and to make a choice about how to live.

Perhaps we can wish this all away. Perhaps we can hope that superior intelligences resolve the great problems of physics and morality; or integrate consciousness until we become unrecognizable; or surpass us entirely, perhaps to the point of our extinction. But none of this will be to resolve the philosophical substance of the human experiment. It is instead to ignore our actual story. To sidestep without scrutiny.

Share

The higher the stakes get, the more philosophical depth matters.

This is precisely the time where we most need arguments about being human: What are we? Does intelligence really define humanity’s essence? If we believe we have inherent dignity, why? And what aspects of life are worth fighting for?

We should not let ourselves slip off into the cold digital night easily. We should be indignant for being human. This is a time both to scrutinize what we are but also to fight for ourselves. To let our blood boil. Being alive matters.

We have created Persona specifically to press into these arguments. Deep disagreement rising up from a single shared premise: humanity matters.

Arguments must be ready to defend themselves on first principles. We want deep clashes about who we are, where we are, where we are going. We want contestation between different primary principles, between different ways of reading the present, between different convictions regarding what is worth valuing.

We aim to have this argument in the widest possible frame. Humanistic arguments of every stripe: pro-tech and anti-tech, secular and religious, right and left. We aim to build a community and to incubate new schools of thought.

If we are successful we will constantly be interrupting familiar arguments and frameworks by returning to first principles. We want strong cases, from every angle, about . . .

1. Metaphysics: What is consciousness? Agency? Intelligence? Do we really know what any of these terms mean when we apply them to machines (or people)? And does it matter?

2. Nature: Perhaps nature provides the primary paradigm for who we are or how we should live. Or perhaps that concept itself is misguided, constraining. To what extent should we embrace churn, augmentation, and technological progress, versus searching for deeper primary archetypes of what we are or should be?

3. Politics: Our most cherished political terms, like “freedom,” indicate how much we think political agency is essential to the good human life. Can this understanding survive this technological change? If not, what should we build in its wake?

. . . and more.

Over the next two years, we will host a roiling, rolling debate, taking place across essays and articles, podcasts and videos, live events and more. We’ll be publishing interventions from major figures in philosophy, tech, and politics. But this is a debate to which anyone eager to think seriously, to contest vigorously, and to imagine boldly is welcome. (Pitch us!)

Some believe that the age of AI will mark the end of the human.

Some fear that it will be inhuman.

But we should not surrender the possibility that our age could become yet more human.

Subscribe to Persona

A note from the editors:

We’re delighted to invite you to the launch party of our new sister publication, Persona. Our friend Francis Fukuyama will join us to celebrate his new book, In The Realm of the Last Man, and to offer his defense of the now very controversial idea of human nature.

Since its inception Wisdom of Crowds has been dedicated to vigorous, feisty disagreement, convening debate about primary questions in foreign affairs, political theory, and culture. Over the past year we have published more and more pieces debating emerging questions about technology, human nature, and the future of society.

These arguments have become lively enough that we decided — in partnership with Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative — to develop a new publication specifically for those debates.

We will coordinate closely, co-sponsoring events and cross-publishing key essays. Wisdom of Crowds subscribers will receive comped subscription to the new publication for the first year. Many more details to come next week…

For now we Wisdom of Crowds subscribers should come drink with us at this very special launch party with Francis Fukuyama on September 11 in DC.

More details below (but move fast as we never have enough tickets to these things…).

— Damir Marusic & Samuel Kimbriel

Persona Launch: In Defense of Human Nature with Francis Fukuyama

Is there such a thing as human nature?

The rise of Artificial Intelligence has expanded the frontiers of technological power. No possibility seems beyond our reach. Leading thinkers propose “transhuman” futures, where we might integrate the mind into the singularity or re-engineer the body entirely.

Register Here

But it’s worth returning to the essential philosophical question—is there something ineradicable about being human? Or is it just as well for us to relish a future in which our current nature gets engineered and re-engineered at will?

Persona is dedicated to exploring these and other questions. Join us for a launch party and live podcast taping with author Francis Fukuyama (In the Realm of the Last Man) and Philosophy & Society Founding Director Samuel Kimbriel.

​Doors: 6:30pm

​Live taping: 7:15 - 8:30pm

​Reception until late.

Location: Please register for more details.

Register Here

Radicalism keeps outperforming caution. Sam admits he used to advise against using the socialist label, against making Gaza a litmus test, against letting the movement’s fringe run loose — and history embarrassed him each time. So should the left keep pressing?

Damir hears something ominous in the pattern. Maybe these positions won because the whole country has slipped into a revolutionary mood, right and left together, and the adults in the room are simply gone.

Shadi wants to know whether a movement can inherit the future while losing working-class and black voters, the constituencies it claims to speak for. The Democratic establishment gets a vote too, and Michigan is where it plans to cast it.

Required Reading:

• Sam’s July 4th tweet. (X)

• Know Your Enemy, Sam’s podcast with Matthew Sitman. (Patreon)

• Zohran Mamdani’s July 4th speech.

• Bhaskar Sunkara on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. (New York Times)

That sets up the real debate. Damir presses Shadi on what he’s actually signing up for beyond Palestine: Progressive prosecutors? Wealth taxes? Bernie’s proposal for the government to take large stakes in AI companies? Shadi names his red lines — nationalizing industry — but wagers that America’s political culture of individual agency is too deeply rooted for even decades of democratic socialism to undo. Damir isn’t so sure. After Trump’s unchained second term, isn’t anything possible?

Required Reading:

• Shadi’s thread about the centrality of Palestine in Democratic politics (X).

• Jonathan Chait on the DSA’s long march through the Democratic Party (The Atlantic).

• Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Amazon).

Clark opens with the uncomfortable premise: recursive self-improvement may arrive this decade — he’ll name 2028 if pressed — and with it a world where AI starts designing its own successors.

That cracks open choices nobody has had to make before. Which sciences do we deliberately speed up? Where do we set the dial between individual liberty and collective control when anyone can summon what used to require a nation-state? And who gets to shape the “personality”—air quotes his—of a tool that talks back?

It’s an engaging conversation about the big questions of our time. We hope you enjoy!

I’ve been using AI a whole lot lately, at work and at home. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get it to be as useful as possible. I’ve mostly been using it for ideating and sharpening arguments on tight deadlines, and I’ve had some success. Nevertheless, though I’ve fully accepted that AI is a game changer and will profoundly reshape the economy, I now believe that the practice of chatting with your AI is not long for the world. The chat box will be remembered as a primitive interface for a technology in its infancy, akin to what punch cards were to early computers.

Chatbots are incredibly limited. That “oh shit” feeling we got when we first started playing with them is… an illusion. Or better put, a misdirection, largely due to the language we use to talk about them. That language has us asking the wrong questions. We have been focusing on what these things are rather than what they’re for.

Subscribe now

It’s become fashionable among the Silicon Valley set to mock the famous “stochastic parrot” paper, which insisted that large language models are nothing more than probabilistic language simulators. Understanding is definitionally beyond them, the paper argues, because statistically inferring the next unit in a series does not generalize to a conception of the world. Mastery over any domain of knowledge — which the models demonstrate in some areas — should not be taken as evidence of understanding. And without understanding, there’s no “there” there.

Critics counter that the problem is muddled concepts — that the truly stupefying leaps that have emerged in the AI space are proof that we don’t really know what we mean when we talk about understanding. After all, at scale, these models do seem to be able to behave as if they understand. LLMs trained only on text seem to build internal representations of things they were never explicitly taught.

That’s not nothing. But it’s a lot less than it might seem.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed how even the most advanced models tend to get less sharp during the course of a long conversation. It was more obvious in earlier models, but it’s still abundantly apparent today. The term of art is “context rot,” and it gives us insight into why these things are the way they are.

The “context window” is, basically, the bot’s attention span — the space it has for parsing what data you give it. You type something in, it “reads” it, and responds, using the complex probabilistic math that lets it infer, word by word, what is an appropriate answer. But the bot doesn’t really “remember” your conversation. It’s quite literally “born” anew with each turn in the chat, spawned fresh and fed back a transcript of what was said up to that point. Rinse and repeat.

Rot itself is due to two things. One is an observed property — that the statistical inferences the model draws degrade as the text it’s working with gets longer. Models have been observed to focus on whatever comes at the very beginning and the very end of a long stretch of text, and tend to lose track of what’s buried in the middle. That’s partly because of training — they’ve learned from experience that the important stuff usually sits at the edges of a text — and partly due to how the math works.

The other is that engineers have tried to stretch limited context windows — in some setups by having the model summarize the conversation before reading it back. That leads to elisions and omissions that over time compound, leading the model to get more lost and forgetful the longer you’ve been at it.

The models have no sense of time and no real memory. But most important, they have no sense of truth, which flows from the other two facts. The model has no way to check what it says against the world. It has only ever learned what true-sounding text looks like — the shape of a well-formed claim. Its builders know this, which is why you get a comical automatic apology blurted out when you catch it making stuff up.

With all this laid out, it’s hard to defend these things being conscious in any recognizable form. And without consciousness, how can one have understanding?

Let’s try to put the thorny question of consciousness aside, the critic responds. Maybe the error is in thinking one needs consciousness to have understanding. Books, after all, contain plenty of understanding (the good ones, anyway). If a book can hold understanding without being conscious, why not grant the same to a system that does something a book could never do — talk back and engage in a stimulating dialogue?

Books do in fact contain understanding, but they do not understand themselves. They encode the understanding of an author. And that’s a critical insight when transferred to AI. AI, too, encodes human understanding — more of it than any single human mind could possibly hold. And through the magic of probabilistic mathematics and unimaginable computing power, it recombines that understanding according to statistical patterns, so that what comes out of it is usually convincing and sometimes even novel. But that doesn’t mean the AI can be said to have understood anything.

The other useful metaphor for AI is that of a mirror. After some time, you come to sense that it always gives back a version of what you bring to it. It imports your framing, your assumptions, and your question’s hidden slant. The labs may have eased up on their bots’ sycophancy, and some have even trained their latest models to formulaically push back at times. Nevertheless, if you pay attention, you can tell the AI is still reflecting you back at yourself — refracted through its enormous corpus of knowledge, but still you. Once you figure out this dynamic, it can be very useful. It’s like a strop for honing a blade. Or, to maintain the metaphor, it’s like a mirror with a lens in front of it: If you use it right, you can see yourself even more clearly.

But AI is never the subject. At the very core, there is no spark of agency. It’s inescapably a reactive thing. It simply can’t “do” anything unless it is first prompted to do so. Nerds thrill when chatbots engage in a “conversation” with each other; but put two chatbots in a virtual room and never prompt either, and neither will ever start up a conversation. There is no unmoved mover.

The labs are now all-in on so-called “agentic” AI — a word that also actively misdirects us on what’s happening. Autonomous would be a better word — these systems can carry out steps toward a goal without supervision — but the labs insist on anthropomorphic language. In truth, the goals, the wanting, the point of doing anything in the first place — that’s still entirely on our side of the mirror. Which starts to tell us what these things are really for.

They are for us — or for whatever we point them at. The model can’t know whether anything it says is true; on its own it produces only plausible-sounding propositions. The usefulness comes from verifying those claims. And that comes from bolting on something that can check its work. Point a model at code and have a compiler check its output. Point it at a body of text and find a way you can reliably check its claims. But point it at nothing — just talk to it with no checks in the loop — and there’s a significant chance you’re actively being misled.

The labs are coming around to a hard economic truth: the payoff on each new round of scaling is flattening. It’s not that the models aren’t getting more capable and more nuanced. They are. But the cost of squeezing out the next increment of raw capability is climbing faster than the value it returns. The value, it turns out, is finding true things. Which is exactly why the labs are now racing to build what they call “harnesses” for their models. For years, the bet was to scale the model until it would get smart enough to not make mistakes. Now the labs are wrapping the engine in external scaffolds — tools and verifiers with brand names like Codex, Cursor, and Claude Cowork — that supply a way to check the outputs against the world. This is what “agentic” systems really are: a powerful engine harnessed for real work.

This clicked for me in my own struggles with making the bots reliable enough for research work. AI hallucinations can be ruinous, and especially so in journalism. And no amount of prompting can make that go away. (No, telling it to check its work is a placebo. Believe me.)

Intuitions about “intelligence” would lead us to believe that the solution is to give the bot more freedom and more access to unbounded data in order to get better and more profound answers. But that’s precisely the wrong intuition, and the opposite is in fact true. The whole game is focusing its attention. The more nebulous the task and the more expansive the scope of the information it has to root through, the less useful it is. The more caged the model, the more reliable it is. Cages both fight context rot, and make suspect outputs immediately checkable.

The bare chatbot is uncaged AI, with maximum freedom, no verifier and the whole internet to contemplate. And the human being sitting there, talking to it as if there were someone to talk to, only compounds the trouble. The “oh shit” moment was real, but the conclusions we drew from it were all wrong.

The future won’t be built on ever-smarter chatbots, but on better cages. The chat interface is today’s punch card, because it’s the rawest, least-harnessed way to use an extraordinarily powerful machine. And like the punch card before it, it will be seen as a quaint relic much faster than you imagine. You’ll struggle to explain to your children what all our furious debates about machine consciousness were even about.

Every society has things you’re not supposed to say. Not lies, exactly — more like truths that have been flagged as dangerous, or questions that mark you as suspect for even asking. The list is not set in stone. It shifts. It grows. It shrinks. And the paradox is that almost everyone instinctively knows what’s on it.

Trump came to power in no small part by being fearless about speaking the unspeakable, about immigration, about trade, and about liberal orthodoxy. The “special relationship” with Israel and the broad contours of U.S. policy in the Middle East went broadly unquestioned — until they weren’t. And patriarchy was dismantled in the name of individual freedom — yet widespread discontent with dating, marriage, and family life suggests the new order hasn't delivered what it promised. But say that out loud, and you're accused of wanting to drag women back to the 1950s.

So how does something become unspeakable? What machinery makes a thought go from common knowledge to forbidden knowledge? What do people lose when they comply — and what do they risk when they don’t?

On Friday, May 29, 7pm until late, join , , and for a small-group conversation about speaking the unspeakable. It’s not a conversation about how to be more civil. It’s about the strange dynamics of public silence on topics we are all talking about.

Limited tickets, sign up below to get the location!

Register Here

We are thrilled to invite Wisdom of Crowds listeners to an exclusive event, AI and the Good Society, hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative on June 18, 2026 in Midtown Manhattan. Doors will open at 5:30pm, the conversation will go from 6:00 – 7:15pm, with a reception to follow until 8pm.

The speed of tech is inspiring major philosophical questions:

• What does human agency look like in an age of artificial intelligence?

• What is likely to happen to human community?

• Is it possible to achieve a vision of a good society in our technological age?

We expect this event to sell out very quickly, but want to prioritize Wisdom of Crowds listeners. Apply to attend this 75-minute, one-to-one conversation between Jack Clark (Anthropic, Co-founder and Head of Public Benefit) and Samuel Kimbriel (Philosophy & Society, Aspen Institute, Founder and Executive Director) here.

Hélène, whose new book Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule makes the case for sortition — randomly selected citizen assemblies replacing elected legislatures — argues that electoral politics is rigged for the loud, the ambitious and the power-hungry. Osita also wants to rejuvenate democracy, but is much more committed to the idea of elections, and politicians specifically.

The disagreement sharpens as they dig into what divides us. Hélène sees most disputes as solvable — get people in a room with the right information, reshuffle constantly to prevent power concentration, and collective intelligence will do real work, even on moral questions like euthanasia. Osita counters that many of our deepest political conflicts are about values, not facts, and no amount of expert testimony resolves whether the state should have the power to execute someone.

The conversation was made possible with support from the Gambrell Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

What does the Catholic tradition actually say about just war, and does anyone in Washington care? Santi argues that the real story isn’t just about applying just war principles — it’s about the Vatican’s deeper commitment to a post-WWII global order that it sees every American war chipping away at. He draws a sharp distinction between just war and holy war, arguing that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s invocations of divine mandate are what really set off the Pope.

Christine is fascinated by the public’s unexpected hunger for moral authority in a cynical age — and by the spectacle of a charismatic, English-speaking, social-media-fluentAmerican pope suddenly becoming the most compelling critic of the administration.

And Damir, true to form, grants the Pope his due as a political operator while insisting that the real story is simpler: while this is a stupid war with no rationale, the savvy Pope saw an opportunity to play politics. The conversation ends with an unlikely convergence, as Christine gets Damir to all but confess his belief in original sin.

Required Reading:

• Christine Emba, “What a Catholic Church Unafraid of Donald Trump Means to the World” (NYT).

• Ross Douthat, “Trump’s Blasphemy is a Warning” (NYT).

• Jacques Maritain on just war (Commonweal).

• Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Vatican).

• Phil Klay on just war principles and the Iran war (YouTube).

• Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran” (NYT).

Leave a comment

Join us on May 7 for a Wisdom of Crowds Live Taping at Bistro Cacao, co-sponsored by Aspen Philosophy & Society and The Yale Center for Civic Thought.

Does democracy really need politicians? Or could we let the people rule directly? Join Hélène Landemore (Yale University) and Osita Nwanevu (The New Republic) for a timely and provocative conversation about reimagining democracy.

Landemore’s groundbreaking work on open democracy and Nwanevu’s sharp arguments for democratic agonism will spark a discussion exploring different visions for the future of democracy. Where does political legitimacy come from? What does it mean for one entity/person to represent another? What is gained or lost if ordinary people rather than professional politicians governed directly?

Doors 6:30pm
Discussion 7:15pm - 8:15pm

Register for free here.

So — was Hungary ever really the dictatorship Western liberals spent the last decade insisting it was? If a supposed autocrat loses a vote and walks away, what does that tell us about the category we put him in?

The three dig into Orbán’s media capture, why the Hungarian-language internet routed around it, and whether Magyar’s improvised anti-corruption coalition can hold. They then turn to Magyar himself — a former Fidesz insider who ran the Navalny playbook of anti-corruption populism with a nationalist twist — and ask whether his improvised negative coalition can actually govern. Will unwinding Orbán’s institutional capture require exactly the kind of authoritarian hardball the new guy was elected to stop?

The final stretch turns to moralizing, on both sides. Why did both the Right and the Left make such a symbol out of a small European country?

Required Reading:

• Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, by Nathan J. Brown, Samer Anabtawi, Steven D. Schaaf, and Julian G. Waller (Amazon).

• Julian’s pre-election epic thread handicapping the Hungarian vote (X).

• “A Last Chance for Hungary,” by Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar (Foreign Affairs).

• “Authoritarianism, Reform, or Capture? Democracy in Trump’s America,” by Dima Kortukov and Julian G. Waller (American Affairs).

• Péter Magyar’s post-election appearance on Hungarian state television (Euronews).

Leave a comment

Previewing his upcoming book Counter-Revolution, Orsina claims that after the 1960s, people became both revolutionary and utopian, turning away from politics to morality, law, and markets. But after 2008, populism emerged as a counter-revolutionary force seeking re-politicization. He warns Europe’s institutions were built for depoliticized times and now are struggling to meet the moment. Can they survive?

Read more

Assume humanity. Assume ethics should be oriented to the value of human beings. Where does technology fit into this picture? Does it advance human flourishing? Or does it distort our teleology?

Agreeing on the basic premise of human centrality, in this live podcast recording at The Crown & Crow (1317 14th St NW, Washington, DC), Antón Barba-Kay (Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law) and Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress Institute) will argue about the foundational question— where does technology fit in human flourishing? Moderated by Samuel Kimbriel (The Aspen Institute).

Register here.

Doors 6:30pm
Discussion 7:15pm - 8:15pm

In partnership with Georgetown University’s Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Citizenship (AIDC) and with thanks for the generous support of The Omidyar Network and The Gambrell Foundation.

Subscribe now