Hank Green proposes a working definition of intelligence as power over information — the ability to manipulate, sort, predict, and generate it — paralleling how physical power means the ability to manipulate atoms. By that definition, AI gives humanity vastly more intelligence, and very cheaply.
Wisdom is a different thing. Verbatim: “intelligence would help you get what you want, whereas wisdom would help you want what you should want or the right things. It’s the ability to figure out which problems are worth solving and then to solve them in ways that don’t create worse problems in the process.”
The asymmetry that matters: AI mass-produces intelligence. Nothing mass-produces wisdom. Wisdom has to “survive contact with reality and also the other people who make up reality” — meaning it is forged in lived constraint, not generated from data.
Theological corollary worth sitting with for sermon work: the church has always claimed to be in the wisdom-formation business, not the information-distribution business. If society is suddenly drowning in cheap intelligence and starving for wisdom, the church’s actual job becomes more visible, not less — but only if the church remembers it is forming character rather than transmitting content. Compare 2026-04-12-spiritual-maturity-measured-in-behavior-not-knowledge for the same shape of claim in a faith register.