Will AI erode human autonomy, or help us preserve it?

You are going to be tempted in ways that you have never before been tempted to outsource your thinking

And you're going to have to resist that. AI already completes our sentences

It already sorts our inbox. It already tells you what the next song in the queue is

And that is all kind of in the realm of convenience. But that's just the start

Soon, AI could silently determine what ideas ever reach your mind or what thoughts form within it

your next action, your next decision, your next job or relationship or purpose

That's the scenario of an autocomplete for life. 200 years ago, the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt

thought a lot about this when mechanization was just starting to transform the world

And he issued a vision and a warning. To flourish as humans, we have to be self-directed

We are the architects of our own becoming. But if we offload our thought, if we let AI automate the things that we want to pursue, then do we lose something

Are we hollowed out as humans? Does it still remain our life to live

So when you're building a technology like artificial intelligence, applying a philosophic habit of mind ends up being incredibly important to deliberate on what we're building and why

I'm Brendan McCord. I'm the founder and chair of Cosmos Institute. We are trying to cultivate a new kind of technologist that we call the philosopher builder

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Similarly, the unexamined product may not be worth building

Silicon Valley was once a place that married a bold moral ambition with incredible engineering

You even had people thinking, like Steve Jobs, that technology with the humanities was essential

to produce the kinds of products that make our hearts sing. So there was this kind of marriage

and somewhere along the way, that changed. We have seen the best minds of our generation

shift their energy and attention towards driving the attention of others and mining their data

So how do we bring back that vital spirit of Silicon Valley that was to bring into being companies that mattered Let say we were building a rocket We would need the propulsion that comes from the engineering

efforts, but we would also need the guidance. We'd need a way to point the nose of the rocket

and have a star tracker. Philosophy provides that star tracker. Yet it's incredibly rare

in Silicon Valley. Why is this the case? Well, there are three archetypes that I see in

technologists I talk to every day. First are the puzzle absorbed. These are people like me when I

was building AI startups. They're people that are very focused on the technical and business problems

before them. And they're not really stepping back and reflecting on the broader ends of their

creation. The second is the reductionists. And these are people that take something they're good

at say computation and they say things like if this problem can't be solved by computer science

is it worth solving at all? They take morality and they try to make it something that's computable

The third category are the dismissers. People who say you know philosophers they tend to be pretty

smart but it's totally irrelevant. You know like the world is changing what could we possibly learn

from these radical alien minds of the past and this is a philosophic position of a kind it's just

not a very good one. I think there's an antidote for this and I think it's developing a builder

who takes seriously the ideas of human flourishing, who thinks about how to build systems that

promote and safeguard human autonomy, that help us seek truth, that resist centralized control

Some of the best thinkers about technology, about what it enables, about how it could be

equipment for flourishing, they lived hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago outside

of the modern technological bubble. The three greatest critics are people like C.S. Lewis

or Alexis de Tocqueville or Martin Heidegger. These are not the people that are publishing Substack

and there's a kind of blitzkrieg that happens every single day in AI, so we feel like we have to just sort of

keep up with things on the frontier. At times of immense change

the best thing you can do is just take a step back and to try to look at what questions should be primary

What questions are perennial questions? And try to get perspective from people that are outside of the modern technological bubble As a builder your quintessential job is to create a shared world

We have to reflect deeply. And that's where philosophy is essential. We think that the world creates moments when philosophy really matters

And that the builders are at the front row seat of history

One of the things that Aristotle does is he teases out the difference between the goals we have and the means we would use to attain those goals

If you're a builder, you should ask yourself, what am I building for

This is no less important a question than when Plato's Socrates asked, what is justice or what is courage

at Cosmos Institute. We are trying to create and support a new kind of technologist

the philosopher builder, someone who can go from first principles to first prototype

creating new worlds through culture, through code, through their commitments to human flourishing

The ancient Greeks had two words for order, taxis and cosmos. Taxis is the order that you impose

from the top down. In contrast, cosmos is the kind of bottom-up order, the evolutionary adaptive emergent order

In Plato's Republic, he introduces the concept of a philosopher king, someone who marries wisdom with power and discovers the truth and then uses it to rule

The philosopher king is the taxis approach. It's the top-down, unitary design of a blueprint for the best society

It presupposes that one mind, human or artificial superintelligence, can access the truth and can use that to rule over each of us

By contrast, the philosopher-builder approach is cosmos. It's a distributed set of entrepreneurs who are themselves creating tools that unleash the creative powers of a free civilization

And each of them may only have a sliver of the truth

But collectively, if we sort of weave those together, we can get a better system, one that preserves the possibility

of achieving a really wide variety of ends When I think about the idea of the philosopher builder I think about Benjamin Franklin You know Benjamin Franklin as one of the founding fathers of America

You probably know that he's the face on the $100 bill. What you might not know is that Franklin was an engineer

He mastered the technologies of his day. He invented the lightning rod, the bifocal lens

He coined the term positive and negative charge in electricity. He's a prolific technical mind

Franklin is also a philosopher. He lives his life by what he calls the 13 virtues

He creates the junto, this discussion club for mutual evaluation. But when Franklin was at his best, what I think makes him truly distinctive

is when he's translating philosophy into practical innovation. He does this with the enlightenment idea that knowledge should live outside of authority

takes that idea, builds the first public library system. And he does it, frankly, with the U.S. Constitution

where he takes ideas from Montesquieu, from Adam Smith, from Locke and others

and implements them in the constitutional system that still guides us today

So for these reasons, Franklin is the archetypal philosopher-builder. He proved that philosophy and building could coexist within one person

that we could think about ideas from the Enlightenment and elsewhere, and then realize them in practical innovation

When you are building a planetary-scale decision-and-inferencing technology, you're building systems that can do the thinking for us

You're building the operating system for human civilization. And so the stakes are incredibly high

We need entrepreneurs to bring a moral vision to contemplate about that

We need a bottom-up adaptive order that comes from entrepreneurs building tools and technologies

that unleash the creative powers of a free civilization, that make individuals better and not worse at self-directing

The next trillion dollars in AI infrastructure will either elevate human potential

or introduce a means of perfect control. We are backing the former