The false equivalence between intelligence and wisdom

To extract wisdom from intelligence we must not only find truth within misinformation, but also learn to ask the right questions, writes David Brennan

My choice of reading material tends to gravitate towards the pragmatic over the philosophical – more ‘how to’ than ‘why?’ – so it is rare for me to read a book that completely changes my worldview; even rarer to be able to apply it directly to my career.

The book in question is called ‘Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ by Max Tegmark; a physicist, cosmologist, MIT professor and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute.

It reframes the potential impact of artificial intelligence on us as human beings; mapping consequences far beyond the superficial issues of self-driving cars or voice-controlled smart homes. It questions our future as a species when, as Professor Tegmark puts it, “machines outsmart us all at all tasks”.

For us human beings still managing to hold down a real job in the increasingly tech-dominated worlds of media and marketing (amongst the first industries to be hit by the AI revolution, apparently), the book holds a particular resonance.

For the sake of your future career choices – and those of your children – I urge you to read it.

I was alerted to the book by an excellent blog posted by Arianna Huffington, exploring our increasing reliance on AI and how that is impacting on our potential role in a future, AI-dominated world. She intriguingly separates the constructs of ‘intelligence’ and ‘wisdom’.

Ms. Huffington argues that, as our access to intelligence has grown exponentially, our collective wisdom has suffered proportionally. We now spend far too much time filtering good intelligence from bad, identifying truth from ‘fake news’ and attempting to make sense of the tsunami of information flowing around us. She argues that a surfeit of ‘intelligence’ (which is often anything but) can create division, polarisation of views, misjudgements, hype and a false reality across society.

I see many parallels with the debate around the role of digital platforms and media within the marketing industry.

As Isaac Asimov observed back in 1988, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” That helps to explain one of the downsides of the digital revolution, as observed by Yuri Harari in his book Homo Deus, “in the past censorship worked by blocking the flow of information.

“In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information…in ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today, having power means knowing what to ignore.”

It feels like this phenomenon continues to wreak its intellectual, political and economic destruction despite the well-reported lessons from the financial crash, the political schisms that are forming and even the digital fundamentalism that has limited the debate on how exactly digital advertising and marketing work.

I wrote about the parallels between the hype around digital following the emergence of Web 2.0 and the financial crisis of 2008 in my book published six years ago, and I’m more convinced than ever that those lessons have never been learned. Instead we are repeating the same mistakes.

Back in 2011, I could never have imagined the impact on politics and the very institutions of modern-day democracy. I did, however, successfully predict how the same pressures of hype, misleading information and commercial gain could be applied to many aspects of digital.

We are just beginning to discover, for online advertising at least, just how too much intelligence and not enough wisdom can distort a market so significantly across a sustained period of time, despite (or maybe because of) the enormous amounts of data available to us.

This theme was taken up in an excellent presentation by Ebiquity’s Tim Hussein at a conference of procurement executives. Tim used a beguiling mix of behavioural economics, lessons from ‘The Big Short’, econometric meta-analysis and neuroscience to demonstrate why digital marketing has been subject to a consensus of hype surrounding its supposed ROI.

But I digress.

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There is a glimmer of light. If there is a shift in focus from intelligence to wisdom, then that should be matched by the evolution from research to insight, that I first noted in a piece I wrote for Mediatel three years ago.

I argued that insight needed to find its place otherwise it would be drowned out by the volume of data being delivered by analytics. In retrospect, I was arguing for insight to provide us with more wisdom in the face of untrammeled intelligence.

Alongside my new business partner – industry legend Sue Elms – I have been conducting some qualitative research amongst senior media insight professionals to provide context for a conference we are both speaking at next month.

Overall, we discovered a sense of excitement around the opportunities for insight over the coming years but there were also many frustrations expressed. In particular, there seemed to be a great deal of time and resource spent on managing lots of intelligence – communications flow, slicing and dicing data, responding to top-line requests for more numbers every time the analytics dashboard flickers.

There is often less time and resource available for wisdom. If, in future, AI manages the intelligence, then Insight should claim the human element – the wisdom – for its own, rather than merely provide more intelligence.

Wisdom is often hard to spot, but it contains many attributes which are a major upgrade on simple intelligence. It looks at the whole picture rather than the bits; it contains universal truths rather than context-laden ‘facts’; it is nuanced rather than binary, long-term rather than transient, predictive rather than backwards looking. It is based on human emotions and behaviour rather than analysis of clicks and shares.

Without the representation of the human element to our analysis, we run the risk of many more financial crashes, political hurricanes or digital hype bubbles travelling unchecked and creating vacuums in their wake. Never has there been a greater need for true insight in our industry.

In the final analysis, wisdom can only come from intelligence if we not only find the truth within the haystack of misinformation, but if we can ask the right questions in the first place; otherwise, like the famous scene in Yes, Minister, we will merely create a version of the truth to suit ourselves.

David Brennan is founder, Media Native and co-founder, BE Insight