The Tragedy of Wisdom

Knowledge is different from wisdom. You can know a great deal without being wise — and this is essentially the "criticism" some people make of AI when they call it a "glorified Google search engine." Although such objections have become less common lately.

Acquiring knowledge is relatively easy. All we need is information, access to it, and the ability to absorb it (store it in memory and retrieve it when needed).

But what does it take to acquire wisdom? What does it take to achieve deep understanding?

This is a broad question. I usually think of understanding as integrating new information into an existing network of knowledge. Imagine a graph where each node represents a piece of knowledge, and whenever we learn something new, a new node appears. The more strongly connected it is to other nodes, the deeper our understanding becomes. But there also need to be plenty of other relevant nodes to connect it to.

This means that truly understanding new information will always take some time. Sometimes days, sometimes years.

If I want to know why leaves are green and why they change color in autumn, I can easily look it up on Wikipedia. But if I want to know how to save the world from the threats posed by AI, I… ???

Unlike knowledge, wisdom is not something you can simply acquire.

And therein lies the tragedy of wisdom.