67: The Wisdom Turing Test - Part Two (with Steve Rathje)

What can insights from the psychology of technology teach us about wisdom in the age of AI? In this special follow-up episode, Igor and Charles are joined by Steve Rathje to explore how classic ideas like the Turing Test hold up now that AI can talk compellingly about human wisdom. Steve unpacks what today’s generative models are actually capable of, Igor is intrigued by how quickly the line between human and machine reasoning seems to be blurring, and Charles realises that telling human insight from machine insight isn’t nearly as straightforward as he'd hoped. The trio also reveal the results of our listener poll — who sounded the wisest, and was the audience able to spot the AI? Welcome to Episode 67.

Special Guest: Steve Rathje.

Links:

• Steve Rathje's Site:
• Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (Preprint) - Steve Rathje, Meryl Ye, Laura K. Globig, Raunak M. Pillai, Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Jay J Van Bavel (2025)
• Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition - Johnson, Karimi, Bengio, Chater, Gerstenberg, Larson, Levine, Mitchell, Rahwan, Schölkopf, Grossmann (2024)
• The Turing test: Can a computer pass for a human? | TedEd Video - Alex Gendler
• The Chinese Room Experiment | The Hunt for AI | BBC Studios
• The Chinese Room Argument | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Her | Movie Trailer (2013)