As I continue to focus my blog on AI this week, I want to introduce Andrew Murray Dunn, whose Substack column about the need for 10,000 Wisdom Schools for Innovators caught my eye. Here’s an excerpt,
“Many of our greatest minds and hearts have said something to the effect of how at the end of the day, our greatest problems are spiritual, cultural, educational in nature. That we can’t have the power of Gods without the wisdom, love, and prudence of Gods. So where’s the training for founders and changemakers, engineers and designers, activists and influencers to cultivate such wisdom?”
Andrew’s belief is we can’t have humane technology without humane technologists. On the margins, the mainstreaming of meditation and mushrooms have had an effect on Silicon Valley as has Burning Man, but for so many in the tech industry, these are a momentary refuge from their left-brain dominance more than an integration, a left-brain, right-brain tango.
As technology—and intelligence itself—has evolved exponentially over the millennia, so too, paradoxically, has the destruction of life. Without being anchored by wisdom and compassion, intelligence can spiral toward omnicide: the annihilation of all life. Each great leap in human intelligence has been accompanied by escalating harm—from the cognitive revolution’s role in the extinction of large mammals, to the agricultural revolution’s erasure of entire ecosystems, to the industrial age’s decimation of the global climate.
Why does this happen? Because intelligence, unlike wisdom or compassion, is rooted in a mind that grasps at thoughts and fixed beliefs. It seeks to reduce the living universe to a model—a map that inevitably fails to capture the full territory of life. In trying to fit what is sacred and ineffable into mental constructs, intelligence alone becomes a force of destruction.
Today, exponential technologies are supercharging this unmoored intelligence. We now face a profound danger: not just harming life, but potentially enslaving or eliminating it. And yet, there is another path. When intelligence is placed in service to wisdom and compassion, it can help life flourish in unimaginable ways. The urgent question we must ask now is this: As intelligence scales, how do we ensure that wisdom and compassion lead the way?
Andrew suggests the following,
“To get this right, we need entrepreneurs to create new educational institutions. But, there are no educational institutions training education entrepreneurs in more holistic ways. It’s hard to change the thing while being the thing. Which begs the question: What does it mean to be personally prepared to start a wisdom school for founders?
Similarly to how the visionary Krishnamurti believed that right education comes down to educating the educator as a whole person, perhaps what’s most needed is not a new school but a Wisdom School accelerator decelerator CULTIVATOR to cultivate healthy soil for wisdom school entrepreneurs and their visions to flower.
A training program to empower innovation education entrepreneurs, to learn and practice wise innovation, in the process of building new schools capable of teaching it effectively. In Medieval Europe, guilds served as associations of craftsmen or merchants who regulated the practice of their craft in a particular place. They facilitated quality and conduct standards, training through apprenticeships, resource and knowledge sharing. Might we organize a centralized Wisdom School Guild?”
In the nearly eight years since I hatched the idea for the Modern Elder Academy, the world’s first midlife wisdom school, I’ve seen an acceleration of two major trends around the topics of aging and wisdom. The obvious trend is the new fascination on longevity with biohackers and podcasters galore exploring how we might live longer.
The less obvious and more nascent trend (which is just starting to grow like a baby bamboo shoot) is how do we create wisdom schools as the balance to AI domination? Pre-COVID, I published this post “Want to Create a Midlife Wisdom School?” which didn’t get much attention. But, today, there’s a burgeoning curiosity about creating new educational institutions and communities dedicated to wisdom to be the human balance to AI. In the past month alone, I’ve had four different well-qualified people approach me about creating an MEA in Europe.
I’ll finish with a quote from the Wisdom Waypoints website:
“From time immemorial, Wisdom Schools have emerged in times of global crisis or on the cusp of great leaps in human consciousness in order to help shepherd our planet through the transition. While there is academic teaching that goes on here, that is not the primary business of a Wisdom school; the primary business to help anchor human wholeness and to work with the core practices that sustain the transformation of consciousness.”
-Chip