There’s a growing belief that artificial intelligence might one day surpass humans entirely. After all, models like ChatGPT can write essays, analyze data, solve problems and even mimic human conversation. Some people even believe we’re on the brink of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), ready to build machines that think like us, decide like us, and perhaps even replace us.
But the hype misses something fundamental. Intelligence is not wisdom. And AI, by its very structure, will never possess wisdom, because it cannot evolve in the way human cognition does.
First, let’s be clear on a few terms and what they mean. Intelligence is the ability to learn and apply information, which AI is very good at. It can recognize images, generate text, play games and even simulate human conversation. Wisdom is something much deeper: It’s the ability to evaluate, contextualize and act with judgment across complex life domains. It involves value relativism, long term consequences and managing uncertainty, not just solving puzzles or predicting the next word.
This distinction is not just semantic. Philosophers and psychologists, like those behind the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, have mapped out the structure of wisdom. Intelligence is only one part of it – what we’d call procedural knowledge. But the rest involves insights into human life, moral judgment, and the ability to reflect on uncertainty. AI doesn’t and cannot possess those traits.
Why? Because AI is built on describable, formalizable information. It learns from data that can be quantified, categorized and fed into algorithms. But much of what defines human wisdom lies outside that realm. Human cognition includes the indescribable: intuition, emotion, gut feeling, moral insight and lived experience. These are things we don’t fully understand ourselves, and therefore cannot encode into a machine.
This is what British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein meant when he said, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” If AI’s world is limited to what we can describe and program, then its ‘world’ and thus its wisdom will always be smaller than ours. AI’s intelligence is impressive. But it’s bounded.
Moreover, wisdom in humans doesn’t just come from learning, but from a priori cognitive structures. As German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued, we don’t just absorb information, we shape it with built-in cognitive frameworks like time, space and causality. These frameworks allow us to intuit things beyond raw data. Scientists like Albert Einstein didn’t just process inputs, they reimagined the structure of reality itself. No amount of data can replicate that kind of leap.
This is where AI hits its ceiling. It can self-enhance, get better at pattern recognition and optimize its outputs, but it can’t self-evolve like humans can. Its structure lacks the very thing that makes cognitive evolution possible: a priori intuition. Without that, AI’s gains are enhancements, not evolution.
Even if AGI is reached in some form, it will still be operating within the narrow lanes we paved for it. It might outperform us in speed, memory or domain-specific problem-solving, but it won’t gain self-generated insight into life, morality or existence. It won’t ponder meaning because it can’t experience anything. It won’t be wise.
In short, AI won’t catch up or replace humanity, not because it’s weak, but because it’s fundamentally different. Machines don’t evolve like we do, and their ‘intelligence’ will always be a subset of our broader cognitive universe. The boundary is not technical, it’s philosophical.
And that boundary matters. Because it reminds us that while we can build powerful tools, wisdom, the thing that tells us how and whether to use them, remains entirely human.
Human beings are evolved (and slowly evolving) biological organisms. No artifacts made by human beings are biological organisms. Nothing ever repeats, including human behaviors and patterns of behavior. Hence, human beings are constantly losing and creating ways of speaking and writing about “the universe.” For example, physical, biological, linguistic, anthropological, theological, etc. “theories” of “the universe” or parts of it – like minds – are being abandoned and created all the time. The result is a network of human beings saying and writing things that resonate more or less with one another, at least for a short time. Resonant-communities, such as Red Sox fans, or quantum field theorists, are temporary sets of living human beings who understand one another, which means they resonate with what the others say and write. There is no universal resonant-community in which everybody understands everybody else about everything. Creating a mechanical artifact, classical or quantum, that is functionally equivalent to a human mind could be fabricated only on the basis of a theory of the human mind. Sure, there have been (Kant, Freud,…) and there are (Friston, Damasio, Barr,…) theories of the human mind. But to test a theory of a human mind would require some means to test the theory. But a test of a mind theory would require some kind of publicly accessible measurement of a human mind, including an explanation of what comes before human thought. However, the pre-thoughts before thoughts are not accessible: HOW COULD THEY BE CONFIRMED? Nobody can think about their pre-thoughts, so any pre-thought nstrumentation cannot be tested. Therefore, functionalism is impossible. Therefore, artificial wisdom is impossible.