Humanity Matters

An opening provocation

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

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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

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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.”

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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.

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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.