The World I Want for My Son
The case for wisdom
My father died in 2012. I was 19.
At his memorial, I spoke, and by speaking I gave all the attendees an excuse to come up and say something to me afterwards.
One by one, they’d walk up, sorta awkwardly compliment my talk, and then try to say something real about the man they knew.
And the word they kept reaching for again and again was wise.
He knew when to speak and when to listen. He knew the difference between being right and being helpful. He was gentle and humble and people sought him out when they needed help.
We named our son after him in the way Jewish families do.
At the naming ceremony, the rabbi put me on the spot: “With your father in mind, what do you hope the world holds for this child.”
I took a second, and said that my hope for him is that he grow up in a world full of wisdom.
Intelligence is becoming a commodity.
That sentence would have been nonsensical five years ago. But today it’s almost boring.
Anthropic recently doubled Claude’s usage limits during off-peak hours — not because the technology changed, but because demand follows the clock. More people want intelligence at 10am than at 10pm, so you get more of it at night.
Intelligence, delivered on a meter. Like electricity or water.
But no technological shift has ever produced wisdom.
The calculator freed us from arithmetic and we filled the gap with spreadsheets. The washing machine freed us from scrubbing and we filled the gap with more work hours. Email freed us from waiting for the mail and we filled the gap with inbox anxiety.
Automation didn’t make us wise. It made us productive, and burnt out.
Information didn’t make us wise. It made us informed, and overwhelmed.
Communication didn’t make us wise. It made us connected, and anxious.
Every time we found cognitive surplus we reinvested it in more speed, more output, more complexity.
Never in depth. Never in stillness. Never in wisdom.
Tristan Harris puts it better than I can: “There is no definition of wisdom, in any religious tradition in the world, that does not involve restraint.”
Restraint. The ability to not act. To hold back. To sit with discomfort rather than resolve it. To choose silence over speech, patience over efficiency, enough over more.
AI has none of this. It is intelligence without restraint. Capability without discretion. It will optimize anything you point it at, forever, without ever stopping to ask whether the optimization was worth pursuing in the first place. It is, in that sense, the purest expression of intelligence divorced from wisdom that has ever existed.
Which means the wisdom has to come from us.
I’ll admit that at points recently, I have wondered if I myself am becoming any more wise as I age.
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time with my friends and family. Now, I apologize for having too much going on to see my closest friends.
I used to spend most of the day, almost every day, outside. Now I struggle to find enough time to work out in my basement on a daily basis.
Most of the optimist takes on AI promise yet more technology: medical breakthroughs, tailored education, scientific discoveries.
Those are all wonderful to be sure.
But the future I want AI to bring is one filled with wisdom.
I want him to go outside on a sunny afternoon and smell life, and I want to not think about any of the things waiting for me on my desktop.
I want him to see so much of his friends and family that I have to explain loneliness to him.
I want him to appreciate the moments of beauty in his life, as they happen.
I hope he laughs and cries and learns every day.
I named my son after a wise man. I hope by the time he’s old enough to understand the difference, the world will have figured out that intelligence was never the thing we were short on.
Originally published on Griff’s Substack on 20 March 2026.