Book Review: Artificial Wisdom

Can AI save us from ourselves?

---

Book Review: Artificial Wisdom

The world is a hellscape of political unrest and catastrophic climate change. Is AI the answer? In Thomas R Weaver's Artificial Wisdom, that is up for debate.

Solid first entry in a new series. World-building is top-notch and plays well with the climate apocalypse/rise of AI plot points. The characters are also solid, and I personally liked having a crusading journalist as the protagonist. The final plot twist that sets up the second book is... a bit jarring but not overly so (can't say I loved it, but it hasn't turned me off from the series either)—overall, a recommended read. I will be on the lookout for the second installment in November 2026.

Here’s something about AI I have observed, especially with school-age children. If they have access to AI, many of them will use it. At least, if I believe anything my high schooler claims. What’s disturbing is that they use it to skirt the rules around cheating and don’t feel bad about it. I watched a news story about this phenomenon on the PBS NewsHour. When faced with a hard math problem they can’t solve, instead of struggling with it and trying to learn how to solve it, students put it into ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever and copy what the AI gives them. Then they patted themselves on the back, claiming to have solved it. Not once do they think that they cheated, nor do they understand or care that, in the end, they’re ultimately cheating themselves.

And that’s the rub in Weaver’s book. Climate change, the indisputable anthropomorphic kind, has ravaged the planet. Humanity, instead of taking steps to mitigate climate change, keeps running at full speed ahead without a thought to what can be done to protect the planet and civilization. Instead, they abdicate responsibility to an AI, which, BTW, requires massive resources to operate, to make all the hard decisions and solve all the difficult problems, much like schoolchildren who don’t know better.