AI vs. human beings: do we have any lasting advantage?

Forbes

24-07-2025

Participants at an Advanced Robotic Capabilities for Hazardous Environments event.
Last Thursday's announcement of OpenAI's new ChatGPT agent, which creates spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, deepens the concern that AI will replace large numbers of white-collar jobs. Do knowledge workers have any lasting advantage over AI? This is an important question, and particularly for educators, who need to know how to prepare students for durable career success.
Gian Segato, of the AI company Replit, has a convincing answer: 'It's no longer as important to know how to do something. It's knowing that it needs to be done and then just doing it.' AI appears to be highly effective at knowing how to do things. But in the highly uncertain world we are living in, the really valuable skills are deciding what needs to be done and then making sure that it happens. Who does that better, humans or AI?
The Habits of Human Excellence
The ancient Greeks and Romans identified a set of habits of human excellence they called the cardinal virtues. These have been honored in almost every major civilization and religion as representing peak performance in human thought, action, and feeling, and give us a unique human advantage, as Dr. Jay Richards has argued.
The cardinal virtues of practical wisdom and justice are the habits for deciding, fairly, what needs to be done. Practical wisdom is the habit of making wise decisions; it involves setting goals, gathering information, and reasoning. Justice is the habit of treating others fairly and with respect, ensuring that the needs of all are addressed.
How does AI measure up in these two areas? AI can gather and process vast amounts of information. Some AI models can even set their own goals, derived from a hierarchical set of 'value functions' programmed into them. AI also conveys respect, and particularly empathy, very well. Blind evaluations tend to find the bedside manner of AI to be more empathetic than that of human doctors. Many people are comforted by talking to AI, and some have even married their chatbots. In tests of moral reasoning, people tend to prefer AI-generated conclusions to those of humans.
Human beings nevertheless retain a decisive advantage in the exercise of both practical wisdom and justice, because our goal setting and sense of fairness come from within—we are complete. We have free will and an innate sense of fairness, evident even in toddlers, while AI is incomplete: its value function has to be programmed into it, by us. It is unable to be self-reflective, as we are, examining and updating our own values.
The other two cardinal virtues (there are four in all) are courage and self-discipline. These are the habits of excellence for dealing with our feelings, particularly our fears and desires. Courage is the habit of moving forward despite fear, and self-discipline is the habit of following our desires only when it makes sense to do so. They are the virtues for making sure that things get done.
Having no feelings may seem like an advantage for AI, in getting things done. Without any fear, robots can enter dangerous situations that would deter humans. Without desires of their own, AI agents should be completely focused on their assigned tasks. And yet, human emotion is a vitally important source of our success as a species. Emotion drives motivation. It is our desires that keep us moving towards better ways of living, while our fears move us away from worse ones.
AI or Unvirtuous Humans?
One might observe that many people do not appear to exhibit free will, that their sense of 'fairness' is heavily biased in their own favor, and that their emotions, far from driving them on to greater things, are dragging them down. People seem to respond only to external stimuli, and can be unrelentingly selfish. Fear paralyzes them, and desires lead them to all sorts of abuse, degradation, and violence. Where's the superiority?
'Whether humans can be durably superior to AI depends on which humans we mean—those living from their best selves or those mired in their worst.'Here lies the key: whether humans can be durably superior to AI depends on which humans we mean—those living from their best selves or those mired in their worst. Our distinctive human strengths emerge only when we cultivate the best in ourselves: the virtues.
From a virtue perspective, those who are not currently their best selves are not doomed to that condition. They just haven't developed their virtues yet. The virtues are analogous to muscles, which need to be exercised regularly in order to grow. Daily practice of the habits of wisdom, justice, courage and self-discipline are what it takes to build each virtue, and we need them all if we are to be excellent at deciding what needs to be done, and making sure it gets done.
Educational institutions, and companies, should foster these virtues. This is traditionally done through a liberal arts education, where students can study the various virtue traditions throughout history, learn from virtuous role models and mentors, and are expected to practice the virtues. Companies likewise can offer education in the virtues, mentoring, and opportunities and expectations for their practice.
We have been upgrading our AI models at a breakneck pace. Instead of worrying about AI overtaking us, it is time to give ourselves an upgrade, by cultivating the virtues to become our best selves.