Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition

Understand

Although AI has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace.

• In this article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart.
• We analyze human wisdom as a set of strategies for solving intractable problems-those outside the scope of analytic techniques-including both object-level strategies like heuristics [for managing problems] and metacognitive strategies like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, or context-adaptability [for managing object-level strategies].
• We argue that AI systems particularly struggle with metacognition; improved metacognition would lead to AI more robust to novel environments, explainable to users, cooperative with others, and safer in risking fewer misaligned goals with human users.