The world creates moments when philosophy truly matters. This is one of those moments. 

As AI continues to make our lives more convenient, the temptation to use it to outsource judgement will also grow, threatening to erode human decision-making altogether. Brendan McCord, founder of the Cosmos Institute, has spent his career advancing AI in the private and national security sectors. Led by a foundation in both technology and philosophy, he is proposing a new kind of technologist – a Philosopher-Builder – that could guide planetary-scale decision-making technology. According to McCord, approaching AI development with philosophical scrutiny is what will preserve our ability to live self-directed lives and flourish as humans. 

We made this video in partnership with the Cosmos Institute, a network of thinkers and builders advancing human flourishing in the AI era.

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

And you're gonna 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's 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.

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 super intelligence—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 of the hundred dollar 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 US 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 the 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.