Psychology Today
AI can serve up centuries of wisdom in seconds, but it still cannot live life on anyone’s behalf.
What AI Can Suggest, Only Life Can Teach
Author: Kaja Perina
There is a reason we return to ancient wisdom to chart our path forward. Some ideas are tested across generations and, across millennia, pass the pass-along test. The Odyssey endures, as theaters this summer will remind you. So do more recent voices. In this issue’s cover story, we include twentieth-century icons William Faulkner and Coco Chanel. Faulkner’s statement that “the human heart in conflict with itself” is the only subject worth writing about is the north star to which I long ago hitched my twin desires to be a journalist and to study human behavior.
To younger readers, Faulkner’s century may feel as distant as Homer’s. We are living in a moment when AI seems to be eating everything. It can feel, at times, like wisdom on demand. So it is important to point out that an AI to which we turn for advice on how to live is merely the distillation of generations of human wisdom on which it is trained. That is no small feat, and I’m a huge proponent of AI in many realms.
LLMs offer endless suggestions for what we could and should do, many of them great, and beyond what I’d have considered on my own. But two issues crop up. First, you are not the central tendency—the statistical average—that AI is built to serve up. Second, you still have to execute, and I don’t mean in the computational sense à la OpenClaw.
You still have to get into the real world and have that difficult conversation. You still have to engage in the friction of daily life and the messiness of intimate relationships. AI can enrich the map, but you still have to explore the territory.
You have to create novelty. You have to travel. You have to initiate rituals for yourself and your family. These being-in-the-world approaches are all explored in these pages.
So, yes, AI may average out Homer, Faulkner, and PT contributors (take that as you will, a compliment or a copyright infringement). In the end, those high-dimensional inputs are only as valuable as the output you make happen in the three-dimensional world.
Credits: TCA, LLC.