Practical philosophy for the age of AI. Judgment, duty, learning and human capability. Consultant by trade. Philosopher & cognitive scientist by training.
Toronto, Canada
Joined March 2007
- Tweets8.1K
- Following1.4K
- Followers1.3K
- Likes326
Pinned Tweet
Rationality is learned.
We learn to perceive what matters, make judgments, give reasons, revise beliefs and act well.
As AI becomes more capable, I’m interested in what happens to the environments in which humans learn to think.
Natural intelligence in an artificial age.
For most of working life, the work taught the work. AI and hybrid work are breaking that loop. Judgment forms in messy foundational tasks, not in theory. Companies that make expert thinking visible will scale judgment. The rest will just scale output.
Learning partners are no longer course brokers. In a federated model, their job is to connect business needs to capability, use AI where it helps, and govern what gets built, bought, or stopped.
Feeling that an AI is conscious is not evidence it is. Consciousness is a scientific and philosophical problem. Our subjective impression of a chatbot is not an answer. Stop confusing the appearance of consciousness with evidence, and get back to using these tools.
When should you build a capability academy? When the organization needs to become systematically better at doing something, not just know something. Temporary, narrow needs get a learning program. A capability that will shape how you compete for years gets an academy.
AI is changing L&D in three stages: design productivity, faster production, directing development. The unit of work shifts from the course to the capability journey. L&D's job is no longer creating content. It is designing how people build capability.
Prudence = duty toward self. Justice = toward others. Fortitude = toward what you can’t control. Temperance = toward what you control. (Cicero)
no part of life, whether in public or in private affairs, abroad or at home, in your personal conduct or your social relations, can be free from the claims of duty; and it is in the observance of duty that lies all the honor of life, in its neglect, all the shame - Cicero
Don’t teach people how to use AI. Give people the cognitive models, methods and permission required to redesign work with AI.
AI adoption is not the business outcome. It is a behavioural indicator that may or may not produce the business outcome.
Cloud evolved from “where should we run compute?” to multi-cloud orchestration. AI is evolving from “which LLM should we use?” to “how should we allocate intelligence?”
Human history is the externalization of capability: tools extended force, machines power, writing memory, and computers calculation. AI now externalizes parts of inference and synthesis. Cultural intelligence is callable. Understanding, judgment and responsibility are not.
Thinking of AI as another mind changes how you relate to it: dialogue, disagreement, perspective.
Thinking of AI as another brain changes how you distribute cognition: memory, search, synthesis, simulation.
One creates alterity. The other creates extension. We need both.
“Intelligence” is a semantically thick concept. It carries layers of meaning from psychology, philosophy, education, biology and now computing. AI did not settle what intelligence is. It exposed how many different things we had been calling by the same name.
Searle’s Chinese Room: a system can follow rules for manipulating Chinese symbols and produce perfect answers without understanding a word. His point: syntax is not semantics. Modern AI makes the room more capable, but fluent output alone still does not prove understanding.