Could AI make us wise?

An alternative to the internet making us stupid.

The internet caters to our baser interests, surfacing clickbait news, ragebait on Twitter, thirst-traps on Instagram, the dumbest thing you can watch on TikTok, the most attractive person on your dating app, and the cheapest things you can buy from Temu. They cater to our love of drama, our superficiality, our hedonism, to get us to scroll, click, buy, and spend our hours addicted to the screen. They make more money that way.

The love of vice over virtue has always been a problem of humanity, but the internet has created an arena of vice in which we indulge most of our days. Even if what we actually want is to spend less time on our phones, read a book, find love, and connect meaningfully with our friends and families, we can’t find those things online. It’s like wanting to be healthy, but finding yourself in a food court where the only options are burgers and milkshakes.

What option do we have but to be our baser selves? As the humanist philosopher Valla once lamented: “The army of the vices is more numerous than that of virtue, so that, even if we wanted to, we could not win the fight against such forces.”

But what if we created an arena of virtue instead? Where the only options on the internet were healthy ones? What if the internet served only…