An Easily Overlooked Post on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy

By Chris Leong @ 2025-06-12T02:57 (+12)

This is a linkpost to https://blog.aiimpacts.org/p/essay-competition-on-the-automation

This week for Wise AI Wednesdays, I'll be sharing something a bit different - the announcement post of a competion that is already over (the AI Impacts Essay competition on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy). If you're wondering why I'm sharing it, even though some of the specific discussion of the competition is no longer relevant, I still believe this post contains a lot of great content and I think it would be a shame if everyone forgot about it just because it happened to be in the announcement post.

This post explains why they think this might be important, lists some potentially interesting research directions, and then finishes with an FAQ. If you're looking to dive into this area, this is a pretty good place to start.

Before I go, I just wanted to share a few paragraphs from the post, specifically why they think this area might be important:
 

AI is likely to automate more and more categories of thinking with time.

By default, the direction the world goes in will be a result of the choices people make, and these choices will be informed by the best thinking available to them. People systematically make better, wiser choices when they understand more about issues, and when they are advised by deep and wise thinking.

Advanced AI will reshape the world, and create many new situations with potentially high-stakes decisions for people to make. To what degree people will understand these situations well enough to make wise choices remains to be seen. To some extent this will depend on how much good human thinking is devoted to these questions; but at some point it will probably depend crucially on how advanced, reliable, and widespread the automation of high-quality thinking about novel situations is.

We believe¹ that this area could be a crucial target for differential technological development, but is at present poorly understood and receives little attention. This competition aims to encourage and to highlight good thinking on the topics of what would be needed for such automation, and how it might (or might not) arise in the world.

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