What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI Agents and Social Media Automation
There is something strangely familiar about the current debate around artificial intelligence. We have built machines that can reason, question, summarize, plan, create, recommend, and increasingly act on our behalf . And now we are discovering a problem that philosophers have been wrestling with for thousands of years: What should an intelligent agent actually do? That question sounds technological. It isn't. At least, not entirely. It is philosophical. The people designing and training AI systems increasingly have to make decisions about truth, harm, responsibility, rules, trade-offs, human preferences, and acceptable outcomes. In other words, they are making decisions that look remarkably similar to the arguments philosophers have been having since ancient Greece. And one of the most useful philosophers to bring into this conversation may be the least technical one imaginable: Socrates. Socrates didn't build machines. He didn't write algorithms. He didn't ...