Wisdom Gap

The "Wisdom Gap" names the idea that there is a large and growing gap between our technological capabilities and our individual and collective capacity to use them well.

Examples

Bridging the Wisdom Gap (Geoff Mulgan and Rufus Pollock, 2020)

We propose that getting wiser personally and collectively is central to addressing critical challenges ranging from mental health to climate change.

1. There is a wisdom gap: Our technological powers have expanded dramatically as have the complexities of our societies. These increases place greater demands on us to make “wiser” choices personally and collectively. Yet our wisdom has not kept up as evidenced by, for example, the growing crises in the climate and mental health. In short, there appears to be a growing wisdom gap.

Scott Atran, In Gods we Trust

Preface title:

Stone Age Minds for a Space Age World

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

Fuller version:

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

Two Year Olds Playing with Kalashnikovs - Humanity in the Age of AI

https://rufuspollock.com/2019/04/08/children-playing-with-sharp-knives-humanity-and-the-digital-age/

I also have other fears about the impact of the digital on our well-being. In fact, I must confess I am something of a hopeful pessimist. I write the Open Revolution not because I am confident of our future but because I am so afraid – and, as Hemingway said, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. We have better angels of our nature and we should attend to them. That does not mean I am confident we will listen.1

My basic concern here is simple: that there is a fantastic mismatch between our “emotional-spiritual” maturity and our “techno-intellectual” maturity.

“Techno-intellectually” we started from a zero base a few hundred thousand years ago: without language, without tools, and as a tiny part of a vast ecosystem. Having discovered language and tools we began to advance and over the last five thousand or so, and especially over the last three hundred we have hit the exponential fast forward button. We created cities, we built roads and railroads, we flew aeroplanes and space-shuttles, we discovered anti-septics and penicillin, made the phone, the computer and Internet. And the latter all within a generation.

And the digital really takes this to a different level because that world – the world we live in now – is the world of Moore’s “law” which states that computation power per unit cost doubles every 18 months. That’s exponential growth on steroids. It means that since 1985, which some of us can actually remember, computers have got a million times more powerful for the same cost (or, equivalently, a million times cheaper) – a computer costing $10,000 in 1985 would cost a cent today.

So here we stand, developing and evolving digital technology faster, literally, than we can comprehend.

And on the other side we have, comparatively, the emotional and spiritual maturity of a small infant. We have barely developed at all for the last few hundred thousand years. We still fight wars, commit everyday violence verbal and physical, and, perhaps most importantly, have incredibly limited self-control and self-awareness. Most of us live as dodgem cars, often out of control, careering through life bumping, sometimes violently, into things and people. Right now, as a group, we have such limited ability to coordinate and reflect that we are putting our entire environment and very existence at risk through climate change.

Von Neumann (1955) Can We Survive Technology

books/vonneumann-1955-can-we-survive

Here is the transcription of the text from the image, keeping the paragraphs intact and removing line breaks:

"For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable."

CAN WE SURVIVE TECHNOLOGY?

by John von Neumann
Member, Atomic Energy Commission

"The great globe itself" is in a rapidly maturing crisis—a crisis attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and underorganized. To define the crisis with any accuracy, and to explore possibilities of dealing with it, we must not only look at relevant facts, but also engage in some speculation. The process will illuminate some potential technological developments of the next quarter-century.

In the first half of this century the accelerating industrial revolution encountered an absolute limitation—not on technological progress as such but on an essential safety factor. This safety factor, which had permitted the industrial revolution to roll on from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, was essentially a matter of geographical and political Lebensraum: an ever broader geographical scope for technological activities, combined with an ever broader political integration of the world. Within this expanding framework it was possible to accommodate the major tensions created by technological progress.

Now this safety mechanism is being sharply inhibited; literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the earth in a critical way.

Thus the crisis does not arise from accidental events or human errors. It is inherent in technology’s relation to geography on the one hand and to political organization on the other. The crisis was developing visibly in the 1940’s, and some phases can be traced back to 1914. In the years between now and 1980 the crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say.

Martin Luther King

An exemplary formulation of ‘the power without wisdom’ problem, that unites the moral interpretation and the systemic interpretation, is found within Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Lecture ‘The Quest for Peace & Justice’ where he speaks of the modern predicament as characterised by both ‘the poverty of the spirit’ and ‘improved means to an unimproved end’: ‘Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future [reaching] new and astounding peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers. Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end”. This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul.

In Strength to Love (1963), King concisely and powerfully phrases the insight another way:

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Buber, I and Thou

The communal life of man can no more than man himself dispense with the world of It, over which the presence of the Thou moves like the spirit upon the face of the waters. Man's will to profit and to be powerful have their natural and proper effect so long as they are linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation. There is no evil impulse till the impulse has been separated from the being; the impulse which is bound up with, and defined by, the being is the living stuff of communal life, that which is detached is its disintegration. Economics, the abode of the will to profit, and State, [48] the abode of the will to be powerful, share in life as long as they share in the spirit. If they abjure spirit they abjure life.

— David Bohm It's not a place you can get to. The wholeness is a kind of attitude or an approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality, then reality will respond coherently to us. But nature has been tremendously affected by our way of thinking on the earth. Nature is now being destroyed. There's very little left on the earth which wasn't affected by how we were thinking. If we have coherence….we will produce the results we intend, rather than the results we don't intend…I think that incoherence has become more dangerous because of the scale of our society and because of technology. We have all sorts of dangers, such as nuclear war, biological war or chemical war, destruction of nature, and probably we can think of four or five others, which are brought about by our power. The greater power we have, the more we need coherence! The question to my mind is: Is the human being capable of dealing with this situation, which he himself has produced?

Ludwig Von Mise, Human Action

Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle. This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest. It is probable that scientists will discover some methods of defense against the atomic bomb. But this will not alter things, it will merely prolong for a short time the process of the complete destruction of civilization. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 828; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 832)

Omar N. Bradley

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” | ‘We have many men of science; too few men of God.’ | ‘The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.’

Norbert Wiener, (1) God & Golem (2)

“In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations… . This is only one of the many places where human impotence has shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.” ‘There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly, more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.

Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics, World-spirit and Natural History: An Excursion to Hegel.

No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

Dr Ralph Linton

“The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns…We are now…only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that…such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern technology” (Note: this quote is used as the epigraph for The Zeitgeist Movement Defined)

Paul Valéry

‘What has happened? Simply that our means of investigation and action have far outstripped our means of representation and understanding. This is the enormous new fact that results from all other new facts. This one is positively transcendent.’

Jacques Ellul

“Particularly disquieting is the gap between the enormous power they [scientists and technologists] wield and their critical ability, which must be estimated as null.”

Isaac Asimov

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

Buckminster Fuller, Humanity’s Critical Path: From Weaponry to Livingry

“…It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.”

US Presidents

“our progress in the use of science has been great, but our progress in ordering our relations small” — the words of John F. Kennedy on the twentieth anniversary of the nuclear chain reaction (just a month after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis) 1962

“the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction… Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” — Barack Obama, Remarks at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (2016).

Pope Francis

Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used…There is a tendency to believe that every increase in power means “an increase of ‘progress’ itself ”, an advance in “security, usefulness, welfare and vigour; …an assimilation of new values into the stream of culture”,83 as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such. The fact is that “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well”, because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience. Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us. “The risk is growing day by day that man will not use his power as he should”; in effect, “power is never considered in terms of the responsibility of choice which is inherent in freedom” since its “only norms are taken from alleged necessity, from either utility or security”.85 But human beings are not completely autonomous. Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint. — Laudato si', Pope Francis (2015)

Pope John Paul (1970)

‘the urgent need for a radical change in the conduct of humanity…the most extraordinary scientific advances, the most amazing technical abilities, the most astonishing economic growth, unless they are accompanied by authentic social and moral progress, will definitively turn against man”.

— Address to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) on the 25th Anniversary of its Institution Pope John Paul (1970)