CONCEPT
Wisdom as Multi-Dimensional Intelligence
Bateson's 2018 claim that AI lacks wisdom because wisdom is multi-dimensional — an embodied, biographical, relationally embedded capacity the computational paradigm cannot supply.
In her 2018 Edge.org conversation, Mary Catherine Bateson said directly that AI 'lacks wisdom, because wisdom is more multi-dimensional' than the kind of intelligence AI possesses. Wisdom, in her usage, is not the accumulation of knowledge. It is the capacity to engage with what one does not know — to hold open the questions that do not have clean answers, to sustain the tensions that resolution would destroy, to live productively in the gap between what is known and what needs to be known. Wisdom is what remains when the specific knowledge has been automated. It is the capacity that the twelve-year-old who asks 'What am I for?' already possesses, because the question itself is an exercise of wisdom.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bateson identified three specific capacities AI lacks: humility, imagination, and humor. Humility is the recognition that you do not know what you do not know. Imagination is the capacity to envision what does not yet exist. Humor is the perception of