Permacrisis, Metacrisis, AI… and Why Wiser AI is Our Best Bet

We’re living in what pundits call a permacrisis or polycrisis —an endless chain of emergencies. Climate change, wars, collapsing mental health, global healthcare issues, political chaos, a disconnected society, employment concentration of wealth, the list is huge. Just when one problem calms down, three more show up like uninvited guests at a house party.

Then there’s the metacrisis, the mother of all crises standing right behind the permacrises. It’s not just one problem, but the way all the problems connect and fuel each other mostly because of the way humanity behaves our values and short-term thinking, to say nothing of power, money and control. Think of it like Jenga: the tower was already wobbling, but now every move threatens the whole thing.

And into this mix drops AI.

On its best days, AI could help us untangle the mess. On its worst, it could pour rocket fuel onto the very decision humans are already making that are causing the permacrises.

AI is clever but not wise. It’s trained on terabytes of data, but its bias is scary. It can spot patterns in data, but it can’t tell whether an action is good for the next seven generations—or catastrophic. It has no pause button for “Is this actually wise?” And if we just keep training AI on data that reflects today’s chaos, or worse train it on synthetic data! tomorrow’s AI will simply scale the chaos at great speed.

That’s why I believe wiser AI is humanity’s best option. Not smarter AI. Not faster AI. Wiser AI.

What does that mean?

• Building AI that reflects humanity’s collective wisdom—from Indigenous traditions to modern science.

• Teaching machines to measure a Wisdom Quotient (like IQ, but for foresight, ethics, and empathy).

• Using AI not just to optimise profits or attention spans, but to help us make decisions that hold up across time.

Because if we don’t do this, AI won’t save us from the metacrisis—it’ll just become the most efficient and effective accelerant you could possibly imagine.

Ironically, wiser AI is also a technical solution to AI’s own innovation dead-ends. Right now, AI keeps tripping over the same hurdles—bias, short-term optimisation, lack of context, ethical blind spots. By embedding wisdom at its core, we don’t just make AI safer for humanity, we make it better technology. A system trained to balance foresight, empathy, and ethical reasoning is less brittle, less biased, and far more adaptable. In fact, its inherent bias could be one mechanism the to making it biased towards wisdom, with the option to dial up the wiser replies. In other words, wisdom isn’t just moral icing on the cake—it’s the missing ingredient in the recipe.

So when people ask me, “Why focus on wisdom? Why not regulation, or more clever tech fixes?” my answer is simple:

• Regulation is important, but it’s always late to the party.

• Tech fixes help, but they patch symptoms, not causes in the fundamental thinking behind the tech

• Wisdom is the root system. If we don’t wire wisdom into AI, the permacrisis becomes at best permanent, at worst – well you work it out!

Someone, somewhere must teach the machine to be wise. If not us, then who? If not now when?

At Akumen, we believe this isn’t just theory—it’s practical and possible. With two decades of ontological experience and hybrid-intelligence tools already mapping meaning at scale, we have the technical capability to define the DNA of Wisdom itself.

That means creating a foundational layer of wisdom deep in the parameters of large language models, so that AI doesn’t just learn words, but learns to weigh them with foresight, empathy, and care. In short: we’re ready to pioneer the tech that makes wiser AI a reality. We need governments to recognise and fund a global shift towards wiser Tech that will help diminish the metacrisis behind the permacrises.

Paul - Founder and Director of Research & Development

Paul is delivering a talk on this subject on 19 November 11-2 at Innovation Exchange: A free Digital Exchange event@ Lanhydrock Hotel and Golf Club Lostwithiel Road Bodmin PL30 5AQ. Tickets on Eventbrite.