AI as the Great Equalizer
Sam Altman, in his essay “The Intelligence Age,” observed that we are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us. In “Three Observations,” he went further: “Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshal the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025.”
Every person alive will soon have access to the sum total of human knowledge — instantly, conversationally, on demand. First the printing press freed information from the monastery. Then the internet freed it from the library. Now AI is freeing it from the expert.
From Knowledge Work to Wisdom Work
Knowledge is no longer the thing that separates people. Anyone can summon the equivalent of a world-class tutor, doctor, or lawyer on their phone — what is our competitive edge? For all you A-students, 4.0 GPAs, over-achievers — this should keep you awake at night. If knowledge is no longer scarce, what is?
For decades we’ve glorified “knowledge workers.” But if AI can do the knowledge part, then what’s left? I believe its the wisdom part. That is, judgment, understanding, creative spark and hard-won experience that tells you which answer matters and why. The era of knowledge work is giving way to the era of wisdom work.
Yuval Noah Harari nailed it: “Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?” He elaborated: “The naïve view of information thinks that information equals truth. If information is truth, the more information you have, the more wisdom you have. This is a complete mistake because the truth is a very rare and costly kind of information. Most information in the world is not truth. Most information is junk.”
We have been building bigger and bigger containers for information. What we have not been doing is getting any better at knowing what to do with it.
What Remains Uniquely Human
When I look at what AI still can’t do — and what it may never do well — the list is telling. Empathy. Ethical judgment. The kind of creativity that comes from lived experience. The ability to inspire people to follow you into the unknown. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the hardest skills there are, and they’re the ones that will matter most.
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder, offered this: “The things that make us human will become much more important… I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever… understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick…”
At the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Sam Altman highlighted that despite fears in the 1990s that AI (Deep Blue) would destroy interest in the game: “Chess has never been more popular than it is now, and almost no one watches two AIs play each other — we’re very interested in what humans do.”
Nobody wants to watch a machine be perfect. We want to watch a human be brave. And for the conflict of man vs machine, we want a front row seat. And a many of us want to be in the arena.
Judgment as the Supreme Skill
Naval Ravikant shares his mental model: “In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill.” He defines the terms precisely: “My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.” And: “I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment.”
The Cognitive Atrophy Risk
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” — 1 Corinthians 8:1
A January 2025 study in Societies found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. A canvassing of 300+ technology experts by Elon University predicted mostly negative effects on empathy, critical thinking, and sense of purpose by 2035, calling on humanity “to think intentionally and carefully, taking wise actions now, so we do not sleepwalk into an AI future that we never intended and do not want.”
Here is a counterintuitive data point: unemployment rates for workers with liberal arts degrees are now about half those of computer science and engineering graduates, based on Federal Reserve data. The labor market is already telling us something. It already values human-centric skills over purely technical ones.
So the machines are getting smarter. The question is whether we are getting wiser. And this is where I want to go back — way back — because this question is not new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest questions ever asked.
The Greeks Knew This All Along
Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato proposed something radical. He called it anamnesis — the idea that learning is not the acquisition of new information but the recollection of knowledge the soul already possesses. In the Meno, Socrates declares: “All enquiry and all learning is but recollection.”
To prove it, Socrates calls over an uneducated slave boy and, through questions alone — never telling him anything — leads him to discover a geometric truth about the diagonal of a square. The boy didn’t learn it. He remembered it. The knowledge was already there, waiting to be drawn out.
But the most powerful moment in the demonstration isn’t the boy’s correct answer. It’s the moment just before, when the boy realizes he doesn’t know. Socrates observes: “He did not know at first, and he does not know now. But then he thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew. Now he has a difficulty, and neither knows nor fancies that he knows.” And then Socrates asks: “Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?”
That question — is he not better off in knowing his ignorance? — might be the most important question in the history of education. And it has never been more relevant than right now, when AI is about to give us the confident illusion of knowing everything.
Socrates’ Own Journey
What makes this even more compelling is that Socrates lived this arc himself. In the Phaedo, he recalls: “When I was young, I was remarkably keen on the kind of wisdom known as natural science. It seemed to me splendid to know the reasons for each thing.” The young Socrates was a confident materialist, excited by explanations involving hot and cold, blood and brain. He consumed knowledge voraciously.
But he grew disillusioned. “At last I concluded that I was wholly incapable of these inquiries.” The accumulation of facts didn’t lead where he thought it would. So he turned inward and developed his dialectical method — the practice of rigorous self-examination that became the foundation of Western philosophy.
When the Oracle at Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man alive, he was genuinely puzzled. He set out to disprove it by interrogating the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen of Athens. What he found was that they all thought they knew things they didn’t. His conclusion, at Apology 21d: “I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man — that what I do not know I do not think I know.”
The wisest person isn’t the one who knows the most. It’s the one who knows what they don’t know. Plato even had a term for the opposite — conceited ignorance — which he called “the great obstacle to philosophy, because no one seeks to know what he thinks he already knows.”
In an age when AI can generate a confident-sounding answer to any question in milliseconds, conceited ignorance is about to become the default condition of humanity.
The Soul Already Knows
In the Republic, Plato rejects the “empty vessel” model of education entirely: “The power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being.”
Education, for Plato, was never about pouring knowledge into an empty cup. It was about turning the soul around — redirecting a capacity that already exists toward the things that matter.
The word anamnesis itself tells this story. It comes from ana- (again) + mnesis (remembering). Its mirror image, amnesia, comes from a- (without) + mnesis. Same root, opposite directions. One is the recovery of what was lost. The other is the forgetting. For Plato, being born into a body was a kind of cosmic amnesia — the soul forgets what it once knew. The entire human project is a recovery from forgetting.
We are not empty vessels to be filled. We are amnesiacs to be awakened.
Every Tradition Says the Same Thing
“I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” — Matthew 11:25
The learned miss it. The simple receive it. Nearly every human exploration within himself arrives at the same conclusion.
In the Chandogya Upanishad, the young Śvetaketu returns from twelve years of Vedic study, “swell-headed and arrogant.” His father asks if he has learned “that by which we perceive what cannot be perceived, we know what cannot be known.” He hasn’t. The father teaches him the great truth repeated nine times: “That is the truth; that is the self. And that’s how you are, Śvetaketu.” Twelve years of knowledge accumulation, and the most essential truth was already within him.
In Buddhism, the Mahaparinirvana Sutra teaches that all beings possess the nature of Buddha — “as butter is inherent in milk.” As Ringu Tulku’s commentary explains: “Attaining buddhahood does not mean we become someone completely different. Rather, we become fully conscious of what we have always been.”
Marcus Aurelius, writing during military campaigns on the Danube, arrived at the same place: “Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”
In Luke, Jesus tells the Pharisees: “The kingdom of God is within you.” Not in the temple. Not in the scrolls. Within.
And Rumi put it most beautifully: “I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.”
Across thousands of years and radically different cultures — Athens, the Ganges, the Danube frontier, thirteenth-century Persia — the message is identical. What you seek is not something to be acquired from outside. It is something to be uncovered within.
The Frontier That Was Always There
So here we are. AI is about to satisfy humanity’s longest-standing ambition: universal access to the sum of human knowledge. And the question it forces is the one that Socrates asked the slave boy, the one the Upanishads asked Śvetaketu, the one every introspection points to.
When external knowledge is infinite and free, what is left to pursue?
We have spent centuries building tools to extend our reach outward — telescopes, engines, networks, algorithms, now artificial intelligence. The next frontier is the one that was always there, waiting within us.
The pursuit of knowledge is done. The pursuit of universal wisdom and truth is and has always been a human’s true quest.