New Intellectuals

Will AI make us smarter, or simply make us faster at being wrong? And will it make us richer, or leave most people poorer while a few get very rich?

We have had a fifty year preview of this in the calculator.

Calculators did both. Experts got smarter with them: they handed the machine the repetitive arithmetic, kept hold of defining the problem and checking the answer, and went on to solve harder problems. Other users went the other way. They lost confidence in their own judgment, accepted whatever the machine produced without a sense check, and made costly mistakes, like entering the wrong interest rate in banking and never noticing.

The lesson is simple: a tool calculates, but it does not understand. Whoever controls the thinking controls the outcome.

AI goes much further than the calculator. It does not just automate arithmetic. It automates writing, analysis, and recommendations. So the stakes are higher, both for our minds and for our money. Used well, AI is leverage: it can extend your expertise, raise what you can produce, and open income that was not available to you before. Used passively, it does the opposite. It weakens the skills it replaces, and it hands the gains to the people who own and direct the machines.

In other words, AI is likely to widen the gap, between those who direct the machine and those who surrender judgment to it, in wealth and in intelligence at the same time.

Join New Intellectuals for an online conversation on:

* What separates cognitive amplification from cognitive surrender?
* Who gets richer when work is automated, and who gets left behind?
* How do you keep defining the problem and verifying the answer when the machine sounds so confident?
* What daily habits turn AI into leverage rather than dependence?

There will be a short opening talk, followed by open conversation and Q and A.

New Intellectuals is a community for curious minds at the intersection of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind. This is an online event, open worldwide, wherever you are. All are welcome, whether you use AI every day or are still deciding what to make of it.

Use AI to extend your thinking, not replace it.