Internal Event – Teaching AI to Care: Prioritizing Wisdom and Compassion over Raw Intelligence

What if the key to safe AI and AGI isn’t making it smarter, but making it wiser? AI and Faith Research Fellow Mark Graves discusses his approach to AI development that prioritizes practical wisdom and compassion over raw intelligence. We explore how ancient philosophical traditions from Aristotle to Buddhism could guide the next generation of AI systems, and why suffering should be central to AI ethics. Moreover, how can we embed said wisdom and compassion in AI systems? How can we measure it? Additionally, we’ll also explore how healthcare applications are already demonstrating what compassionate AI looks like in practice. This conversation challenges conventional thinking about AI safety and offers a surprisingly hopeful vision for human-AI collaboration.