Texting while driving. Bullying people on social media. Buying into the latest conspiracy theory. Passing off AI-generated work as your own.

That may seem like a random list of 21st-century vices. But I’d argue they’re all examples of the loss of one particular virtue: sophrosyne.

An ancient Greek concept, sophrosyne – pronounced “suh-fros-uh-nee” – is what we might call “sound-mindedness” today. It’s a constellation of characteristics, including moderation, reflectiveness and self-knowledge. They’re found in the kind of person who can respect and trust herself, and be respected and trusted by others.

As a philosopher and philosophical counselor, I research the connection between virtue and happiness. In particular, I’ve noticed a connection between sophrosyne and eudaimonia, the Greek philosophical concept for happiness, or living well.

Harmony of the soul

For the Greeks, sophrosyne represented excellence of character, moderation and self-control. It was connected to phronesis, or practical wisdom, and stood in marked contrast with hubris: excessive pride, dangerous overconfidence and lack of self-insight. Heraclitus, a philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.E., taught that sophrosyne was the most important virtue of all.

Plato, who taught a century later, discussed sophrosyne as the ability to know oneself – and to know when you don’t know something. In “Republic,” he likened sophrosyne to a harmony or friendship between the three parts of the soul: reason, spirit and bodily desires.

  At the center of ‘The School of Athens,’ by Raphael, stand Plato and his student, Aristotle. Wikimedia Commons

Plato’s student Aristotle argued that sophrosyne allows people to strike a balance between self-indulgence and self-denial – like someone who tries to get the right amount of physical exercise, neither too much nor too little. Aristotle taught that it was a virtue developed through practice, just like training for a sport or learning to play a musical instrument.

Sound-mindedness, in short, is not inborn but must be learned.

Discipline and discernment

I believe sophrosyne is still essential for the good life, the life of eudaimonia – happiness and human flourishing. It’s not a transitory feeling, but a sense of being your best self. This involves a kind of satisfaction that is not possible without self-knowledge and self-control.

What’s more, it requires the ability to discriminate between the good and the bad, the true and the false – capacities that are not inborn, but learned through steady practice. Without sophrosyne, it may not be possible to discern what is good for yourself or others. And even if you could, without sophrosyne you might lack the will to follow through.

If anything, these qualities might be even more important with the rise of artificial intelligence and social media. In my counseling practice, I’ve worked with people like “Brian,” an idealist who wanted truth and justice to win out over evil and oppression.

The problem was that he didn’t know how to vet his sources. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Brian fell down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. He was certain that the condensation left in airplanes’ wake were “chemtrails,” a government brainwashing plot, and fumed against the “New World Order.” Thinking he knew it all, he was no longer open to reasoned dialogue.

Sound-mindedness helps us keep perspective in the sea of information online. Artur Debat/Moment Mobile via Getty Images

But if Brian is an example of the loss of sophrosyne, another person I worked with, “Lee,” shows how we can develop it. Lee spent quite a bit of time on social media, but she began to wonder how it was affecting her. She slowed down, took more breaks and started paying more attention to what her mind was doing and to how she was feeling.

As Lee became more self-aware, she realized she was wasting her time. She no longer connected to the reasons she had used social media in the first place. “Consuming social media was making me uneasy. It was like pigging out on junk food,” she told me. “Now I read more books, prepare food and walk during the time I had been spending on social media.”

Ripple effect

For the Greeks, sophrosyne was an ideal second to none. In the 1960s, though, Plato scholars Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns lamented that it was no longer “among our ideals.” That seems all the more true today – and the wider consequences are easy to see.

First, there’s the increase in incivility, in all its 21st-century forms – from road rage to cyberbullying. After the isolation of the pandemic, there’s even a new term for general social incivility: “social jet lag.”

The decline of sophrosyne can also lead to screen addiction, diminished attention span and ability to focus – factors that can, in turn, undermine civility. Civility takes sustained awareness of oneself and others.

The consequences go beyond our friends, families and co-workers to democracy itself. If sound-mindedness suffers, excessive pride and overconfidence hurt our ability to engage in reasoned dialogue and to respect other people’s differences.

Timeless virtue

There are a number of factors, I’d argue, that have led to the loss of sophrosyne, including a decrease in funding for education, more teaching to the test and greater economic inequality, which leaves less time and energy for things like personal development.

Another is the decline of mentoring relationships, which the ancient Greeks considered central to intellectual and moral development. A true mentoring relationship involves both instruction and leading by example. It’s about character, not success defined by wealth and status. Today, it appears that mentors have largely been replaced by celebrities and hero culture, with the rich and famous held up as examples worthy of emulation.

I believe the first step toward recovering sophrosyne is to recognize its importance in the good life. The second is to acknowledge its decline. The third is to understand the factors that have led to this decline.

Temperance, moderation, self-control, discernment – qualities such as these add up to a timeless excellence of character that cannot be faked. Becoming such a person requires guidance, practice and consistency.

Ross Channing Reed, Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Missouri University of Science and Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways?

Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.

Altman did not elaborate, but he might have had something like this scenario in mind. Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election.

While platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use forms of AI to get users to spend more time on their sites, Clogger’s AI would have a different objective: to change people’s voting behavior.

How Clogger would work

As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s. Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.

It would offer three advances over the current state-of-the-art algorithmic behavior manipulation. First, its language model would generate messages — texts, social media and email, perhaps including images and videos — tailored to you personally. Whereas advertisers strategically place a relatively small number of ads, language models such as ChatGPT can generate countless unique messages for you personally – and millions for others – over the course of a campaign.

Second, Clogger would use a technique called reinforcement learning to generate a succession of messages that become increasingly more likely to change your vote. Reinforcement learning is a machine-learning, trial-and-error approach in which the computer takes actions and gets feedback about which work better in order to learn how to accomplish an objective. Machines that can play Go, Chess and many video games better than any human have used reinforcement learning.

Third, over the course of a campaign, Clogger’s messages could evolve in order to take into account your responses to the machine’s prior dispatches and what it has learned about changing others’ minds. Clogger would be able to carry on dynamic “conversations” with you – and millions of other people – over time. Clogger’s messages would be similar to ads that follow you across different websites and social media.

The nature of AI

Three more features – or bugs – are worth noting.

First, the messages that Clogger sends may or may not be political in content. The machine’s only goal is to maximize vote share, and it would likely devise strategies for achieving this goal that no human campaigner would have thought of.

One possibility is sending likely opponent voters information about nonpolitical passions that they have in sports or entertainment to bury the political messaging they receive. Another possibility is sending off-putting messages – for example incontinence advertisements – timed to coincide with opponents’ messaging. And another is manipulating voters’ social media friend groups to give the sense that their social circles support its candidate.

Second, Clogger has no regard for truth. Indeed, it has no way of knowing what is true or false. Language model “hallucinations” are not a problem for this machine because its objective is to change your vote, not to provide accurate information.

Third, because it is a black box type of artificial intelligence, people would have no way to know what strategies it uses.

Clogocracy

If the Republican presidential campaign were to deploy Clogger in 2024, the Democratic campaign would likely be compelled to respond in kind, perhaps with a similar machine. Call it Dogger. If the campaign managers thought that these machines were effective, the presidential contest might well come down to Clogger vs. Dogger, and the winner would be the client of the more effective machine.

Political scientists and pundits would have much to say about why one or the other AI prevailed, but likely no one would really know. The president will have been elected not because his or her policy proposals or political ideas persuaded more Americans, but because he or she had the more effective AI. The content that won the day would have come from an AI focused solely on victory, with no political ideas of its own, rather than from candidates or parties.

In this very important sense, a machine would have won the election rather than a person. The election would no longer be democratic, even though all of the ordinary activities of democracy – the speeches, the ads, the messages, the voting and the counting of votes – will have occurred.

The AI-elected president could then go one of two ways. He or she could use the mantle of election to pursue Republican or Democratic party policies. But because the party ideas may have had little to do with why people voted the way that they did – Clogger and Dogger don’t care about policy views – the president’s actions would not necessarily reflect the will of the voters. Voters would have been manipulated by the AI rather than freely choosing their political leaders and policies.

Another path is for the president to pursue the messages, behaviors and policies that the machine predicts will maximize the chances of reelection. On this path, the president would have no particular platform or agenda beyond maintaining power. The president’s actions, guided by Clogger, would be those most likely to manipulate voters rather than serve their genuine interests or even the president’s own ideology.

Avoiding Clogocracy

It would be possible to avoid AI election manipulation if candidates, campaigns and consultants all forswore the use of such political AI. We believe that is unlikely. If politically effective black boxes were developed, the temptation to use them would be almost irresistible. Indeed, political consultants might well see using these tools as required by their professional responsibility to help their candidates win. And once one candidate uses such an effective tool, the opponents could hardly be expected to resist by disarming unilaterally.

Enhanced privacy protection would help. Clogger would depend on access to vast amounts of personal data in order to target individuals, craft messages tailored to persuade or manipulate them, and track and retarget them over the course of a campaign. Every bit of that information that companies or policymakers deny the machine would make it less effective.

Another solution lies with elections commissions. They could try to ban or severely regulate these machines. There’s a fierce debate about whether such “replicant” speech, even if it’s political in nature, can be regulated. The U.S.’s extreme free speech tradition leads many leading academics to say it cannot.

But there is no reason to automatically extend the First Amendment’s protection to the product of these machines. The nation might well choose to give machines rights, but that should be a decision grounded in the challenges of today, not the misplaced assumption that James Madison’s views in 1789 were intended to apply to AI.

European Union regulators are moving in this direction. Policymakers revised the European Parliament’s draft of its Artificial Intelligence Act to designate “AI systems to influence voters in campaigns” as “high risk” and subject to regulatory scrutiny.

One constitutionally safer, if smaller, step, already adopted in part by European internet regulators and in California, is to prohibit bots from passing themselves off as people. For example, regulation might require that campaign messages come with disclaimers when the content they contain is generated by machines rather than humans.

This would be like the advertising disclaimer requirements – “Paid for by the Sam Jones for Congress Committee” – but modified to reflect its AI origin: “This AI-generated ad was paid for by the Sam Jones for Congress Committee.” A stronger version could require: “This AI-generated message is being sent to you by the Sam Jones for Congress Committee because Clogger has predicted that doing so will increase your chances of voting for Sam Jones by 0.0002%.” At the very least, we believe voters deserve to know when it is a bot speaking to them, and they should know why, as well.

The possibility of a system like Clogger shows that the path toward human collective disempowerment may not require some superhuman artificial general intelligence. It might just require overeager campaigners and consultants who have powerful new tools that can effectively push millions of people’s many buttons.

Archon Fung, Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard Kennedy School and Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. IMAGE: Eric Smalley, TCUS; Biodiversity Heritage Library/Flickr; Taymaz Valley/Flickr, CC BY-ND