Reflections from Aspen Institute's Socrates Seminar

This is a guest post from Ashley Kim, a computational scientist and philosophy graduate student who participated in the seminar and is part of the Cosmos team. Sapere Aude — “Dare to know.” Kant made this the motto of the Enlightenment, borrowed from the Roman poet Horace. For Kant, it meant humanity's emergence from “self-imposed immaturity,” our reliance on others to think for us. But three centuries later, we face puzzles Kant never anticipated. What happens when the tools meant to enhance human reason now risk replacing it? What if the greatest threat isn’t ignorance, but knowledge itself—discoveries that could destroy the very civilization that produced them? And in attempting to manage these risks, are we recreating the same immaturity Kant warned against? These questions drove three days of discussion at the Socrates Program seminar, “Will AI Bring A New Enlightenment or Digital Despotism?” hosted by the Aspen Institute and moderated by Cosmos founder Brendan McCord. The stakes

This is a guest post from Ashley Kim, a computational scientist and philosophy graduate student who participated in the seminar and is part of the Cosmos team. Sapere Aude — “Dare to know.” Kant made this the motto of the Enlightenment, borrowed from the Roman poet Horace. For Kant, it meant humanity's emergence from “self-imposed immaturity,” our reliance on others to think for us. But three centuries later, we face puzzles Kant never anticipated. What happens when the tools meant to enhance human reason now risk replacing it? What if the greatest threat isn’t ignorance, but knowledge itself—