In days gone by, the wise old sages sat atop the lofty mountain peak. As living symbols of wisdom, they handed down their counsel to anyone who dared the arduous journey upward. Compare that with the many "grumpy elders" of today, forever scolding the young with a line like "I've eaten more salt than you've eaten rice." Are age and wisdom really in direct proportion? And these days, no conversation about wisdom can ignore ChatGPT. Today we needn't scale any mountain peak at all — we simply go online, type our question into the chat box, and wait for ChatGPT's guidance. But does this modern oracle truly possess wisdom? Has its creator outdone, and replaced, our human wisdom? And can wisdom even be defined?
The difference between "intelligence" and "wisdom"?
Wisdom is defined as a body of practical knowledge and the capacity for good judgement; its ultimate purpose is to guide us towards a full and flourishing life, successfully bringing happiness to ourselves and to those around us. Put another way, wisdom helps us find a good way to live. Wisdom encompasses a range of different elements: intelligence, personality, the interaction between intelligence and personality, and life experience. Intelligence refers to our ability to solve abstract problems and to make sense of complex information — for instance, spotting a pattern within a complicated dataset. Intelligence matters, yet on its own it cannot predict whether a person possesses wisdom. Someone with high intelligence is not necessarily wiser than someone with lower intelligence, because intelligence is only a faculty — it turns into wisdom only when used to reflect on life experience. So how do intelligence and personality relate? Intelligence lets a person find the patterns between things, while a personality capable of reflection helps in analysing and understanding one's own life experiences, and so accumulating wisdom.
Wisdom and its relationship with age
Are older people always wise? Put differently, is there any relationship between wisdom and age? Research shows that, broadly speaking, wisdom does not change between the ages of 25 and 75. Although fluid intelligence (for example, the ability to learn new things) declines with age, wisdom and age are, by and large, unrelated. That said, most of the wisest people tend to be somewhat older, around the age of 60. This phenomenon can be interpreted as follows: growing old is inevitable, but growing wiser is not. The more life experience a person accumulates, the more raw material for wisdom they will of course have — yet only by actively processing and reflecting on those experiences can one truly attain life's wisdom. One study found that clinical psychologists scored higher on wisdom than the general public, and one interpretation is that psychological training cultivates the habit of constantly reflecting on the different chapters of life, and this kind of intensive reflection helps to build wisdom.
The "wisdom" of ChatGPT and GPT-4
We have all witnessed and experienced the wonder of ChatGPT — its ability to answer almost any question a user poses, and the sheer breadth of knowledge it holds, is simply astonishing. But are its answers truly wise? I put an abstract question to ChatGPT: imagine you are a 15-year-old girl now — what are your thoughts on marriage, and what should you consider? When I posed the same question to the more advanced GPT-4, how would it respond? ChatGPT guided the girl to think about her future aspirations and goals, adding various practical considerations such as the legal and family-related aspects of marriage. When I gave GPT-4 the same scenario, its answer set out more comprehensively the various factors worth weighing before marriage — for example, the emotional maturity of a 15-year-old girl, her level of education, her past experiences in different relationships, her financial situation, the values of her family and local culture, her own values, aspirations and goals, and the skills marriage requires for communication and conflict resolution. GPT-4 placed emphasis on the considerations of one's stage in life, the girl's own life goals, the values of her family and of society as a whole, and the issues of marriage, such as communication skills. In that moment, I felt keenly the unease many of us feel about the superior wisdom that artificial intelligence (AI) appears to possess. Yet the wisdom these AIs hold is nothing more than the flowering of wisdom that humanity has woven together over its long and sprawling history.
Wisdom lies in humanity, not in AI
The beauty of human wisdom lies in its complexity, its subtlety and its depth. Wisdom is the collective experience and knowledge accumulated throughout human history, passed down from generation to generation. Wisdom reflects our inner creativity, empathy and intuition. The reason artificial-intelligence tools such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT appear to possess this quality of wisdom is precisely that behind these AIs lies some three hundred billion words of human wisdom — they are simply programmes formed by combining that dataset. ChatGPT reflects the combination and accumulation of collective wisdom from ancient times to the present, while also revealing humanity's boundless potential for uncovering wisdom. We therefore cannot say that these AIs truly possess the trait of wisdom, still less that human wisdom can be replaced by machines. To put it as a metaphor, wisdom can be described as the crystallisation of humanity, a product forged collectively. Every person, every book, every life motto is only a faint vessel of wisdom. If we wish to gain more wisdom, we cannot come to know ourselves in isolation; we need to exchange and discuss more with others or with ourselves, to think about all manner of questions from different angles, and at the same time to experience many different things in order to accumulate wisdom — making our journey through life all the more complete.
References
Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55(1), 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.122
OpenAI. (2022, November 30). Introducing ChatGPT. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
OpenAI. (2023, March 14). GPT-4. https://openai.com/research/gpt-4
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