Can AI Amplify Human Wisdom?
The Wisdom Problem Series 4 of 7
Fourth in the series The Wisdom Problem. Begin with Essay 1 here.
I have been writing this series in collaboration with AI.
Not using it as a search engine or a spell-checker — genuinely collaborating. I bring the intention, experience, driving ideas, and the positions I hold. AI helps me shape this raw material, including pushing back on my faulty assumptions and providing constructive feedback.
I experience it as a focused, creative collaboration. What used to take me days of solitary drafting now takes hours.
I find this remarkable. A couple years ago I proudly wrote “100% human” on something I wrote. That pride feels obstinate now.
I also find my AI use ethically uncomfortable. The tension is a thread throughout this article.
But here’s the honest truth:
I’m now an advocate for AI as an amplifier of human wisdom.
I hope you’ll hear me out.
The wave Suleyman sees
Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave is not a book about chatbots. It is a book about the nature of technology — what it does to societies, how it concentrates and distributes power, why humans have never successfully contained it.
His central argument is that AI, combined with synthetic biology and other converging technologies, represents a wave of change unlike anything humanity has experienced.
I think of it like this. It’s as if humanity went from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies in just three years. And then eighteen months later, the industrial revolution happened. And then nine months later, post-industrial. And then the next disruption, and the next and the next, compounding in speed and scope.
Yes, we’ve integrated the printing press, electricity, nuclear weapons, and the internet. But this wave is different: self-improving, potentially self-replicating, moving faster than institutions can adapt, and arriving simultaneously across every domain of human life.
The word Suleyman returns to is containment. His thesis is that we have never successfully contained a transformative technology. But the cost of failing to contain AI may be civilizational.
I’ve had a small, personal taste of what he’s describing. Working with AI has genuinely changed how I think and create. The capacity it puts within reach is real, and it is growing faster than my ability to fully reckon with it.
But AI will not determine the future. It will accelerate whatever trajectory we set it upon. The AI question is not technical. It’s moral and psychological.
Who is driving AI, and from what interior place?
The environmental cost
AI is not free. Not financially, and not ecologically. My $20 monthly Claude subscription. What does it cost the Earth?
The honest answer is: I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
Anthropic has not publicly disclosed per-query energy figures or filed emissions reports. The lack of transparency makes informed consumer choice impossible. It’s a failure of the company. (At least it hasn’t taught Claude to hide this; Claude drafted this paragraph…though not what’s in the parentheses.)
We do know that data centers currently consume around 4% of US electricity, with projections suggesting that could reach 12% by 2028, driven largely by AI growth. One study estimated that AI systems could produce somewhere between 32 and 80 million tons of CO₂ in 2025 — comparable to Norway’s annual emissions.
The research suggests that, for a casual user like me — AI conversations rather than mass computation — the individual footprint is relatively modest. One analysis found that asking AI questions every day lands as a rounding error on a typical American’s total electricity footprint. It’s the equivalent of using a space heater for a couple of hours, spread across a year.
But here’s the thing: the question of whether my AI use is “too much” cannot be separated from the question of whether my entire way of living is too much.
I drive a car. I wear mass-produced clothing. I live in a house that is heated and cooled. I eat food that has been grown, processed, and shipped. Every element of my modern American life carries an ecological cost that I have largely accepted.
I am aware of it and I don’t like it. But I don’t know how to change it. Meanwhile, I have to keep living life.
I once aspired to grow my own food, sew my own clothes, and live off the land. The reality is, that wasn’t a way of life accessible to me. It isn’t for most people. Those who manage to live that way pay a cost in relevancy, connection, and influence with the broader world.
On the other hand, I then think of friends with funny anti-Elon bumper stickers on their Teslas. I notice they don’t stop driving a Tesla. There seems to be a degree of absolution in the bumper sticker.
My point is this: it’s hard to avoid values contradictions if you live in our society. “Live simply so others may simply live” is a beautiful idea that is very hard to do in the United States if you eat food, wear clothes, use a phone, drive a car that requires roads, or consume entertainment.
To live a locally-grown, organic, carbon-neutral lifestyle costs a lot of money. It’s hard to make that money selling vegetables at a farmer’s market.
So we draw moral lines where we can, and learn to live with the rest.
I am doing this too, and I want to be honest about it.
Sigh.
All that said, the real ecological driver isn’t personal AI use. It’s the mass computation underlying AI infrastructure at scale — the training runs that consume the energy of a small country in a matter of weeks, the always-on inference serving billions of queries globally, the data centers multiplying faster than renewable energy can supply them.
One estimate projects that by 2028, AI-driven data centers could consume 720 billion gallons of water annually in the US alone — equivalent to the water needs of a mid-sized nation.
The individual user’s footprint is a rounding error. The systemic footprint is a genuine crisis.
I think it’s worth acknowledging that AI may be the only tool with the capacity to find solutions to the problems it creates. Can we ask AI how to power AI without destroying the earth? Yes, and that work is happening. AI is being applied to protein folding, materials science, climate modeling, and energy grid optimization.
The tool is not neutral. But it is also not necessarily destructive.
Which brings me back to the question of who is driving it, and how.
Two insufficient responses
I notice two common responses to AI, and I want to name both before pointing toward a third way.
The first is uncritical adoption. Diving in without ethical consideration, without asking what this costs or who it serves, treating capability as its own justification. This is high agency without wisdom — the pattern I described in Essay 3.
The people most loudly celebrating AI as pure liberation tend to be the same people least likely to question whose liberation they mean.
The second response is reflexive aversion. Narratives like:
AI is just combining existing human knowledge, nothing genuinely creative is happening.
It will plateau when it starts regurgitating its own content.
The environmental cost makes it unconscionable.
Or simply: This isn’t for me — I do things the old fashioned way.
Some of these concerns are legitimate. The environmental cost weighs most heavily on me. The question of what “creativity” means for a system trained on human expression is philosophically serious. The instinct to protect certain ways of working from disruption is not always reactionary — sometimes it’s wisdom. We need to think seriously about what AI is doing to human learning, joy, and citizenship.
But reflexive aversion cedes the future, and we can’t afford to do that.
If the people most committed to wisdom, inner work, and the common good opt out of AI entirely, the trajectory of this technology gets determined by the high-agency, low-interiority, self-protective elite I described in Essay 3.
That outcome frightens me more than the ecological cost in a world where the environment is already being systematically destroyed. Especially since AI has the potential to reverse ecological ruin in a way humans how proven incapable of doing on our own.
You may disagree.
Reflexive aversion cedes the future, and we can’t afford to do that.
Discernment is the word I keep returning to. Not blanket adoption, or total rejection — discernment. Asking what this tool is for, what it costs, who benefits, what it amplifies, what possibilities it forecloses. Using it with eyes open.
I’d put that in the category of “wise action.”
What amplification means
Alongside containment, Suleyman uses another word: amplification. This is what I find most clarifying.
AI doesn’t introduce new human impulses. It amplifies existing ones. The impulse toward connection and creativity: amplified. The impulse toward surveillance and control: amplified. The desire to democratize access to knowledge and capacity: amplified. The desire to concentrate power and eliminate accountability: amplified.
In Essay 1, I described the Minneapolis ICE response as a glimpse of wise collective action — neighbors showing up for neighbors, without institutional permission, from something recognizable as Self.
I find myself wondering what that kind of response looks like when it’s amplified by AI. Mutual aid networks that can organize as quick as thought. Local intelligence about community needs gathered and acted on at a speed no institution can match. People with no access to lawyers suddenly having access to something like legal reasoning. The democratizing possibilities are real.
And then I think of the other side. A political culture already prone to manipulation, disinformation, and the weaponization of grievance. Elite networks already good at closing ranks and protecting each other. The selection effects that filter against wisdom at the top of institutions .
The wave is coming regardless.
To me, the question is not whether to engage with it.
The question is whether enough people with enough wisdom — enough genuine interiority, enough Self-led discernment — can get their hands meaningfully on the wheel.
Ask this question again and again and again
I am writing these essays in collaboration with AI. I am aware of the cost of that. I am aware of the irony of using a technology shaped by elite interests to argue for wisdom as a force for the common good of humanity.
I am doing it anyway, because the alternative — opting out of one of the most significant tools of human history, demanding a purity I don’t apply to my furnace or my car or my phone — sounds like emotional safeguarding masked as virtue.
Instead, I am staying with this question:
Who is driving this, and from what interior place?
I think we can still influence that. Next week I’m going to try to imagine what it would look like if enough of us did.
Next week: What We Could Become — what healthy leadership and a wiser world might actually look like.
Thank you Matthew - I have taken a deep dive on a topic with Claude as a partner and it has been a remarkable experience, and I'm not fully comfortable with it yet.