by Dr. Igor Grossmann, Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, Director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab

COLLOQUIUM by Dr. Igor Grossmann, Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, Director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab.

Title:  AI & Wisdom: Can We Create Wise AI?

Date: April 16, 2026, Thursday

Time: 06:00 PM

Venue: C.V. Raman Auditorium, Lecture Hall Complex, IISER Pune campus

About the speaker: 

Dr. Grossmann holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan and is a recipient of the prestigious Humboldt Research Award (2026). He is a College Member of the Royal Society of Canada.

His research explores how people make sense of the world through expectations, beliefs, and metacognition, and how cultural forces shape human behaviour and societal change. His work focuses on wise reasoning, such as intellectual humility and perspective-taking, across cultures and time, with applications to forecasting, cultural change, and human-AI decision-making.

Abstract:

Although AI has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace. In this article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart. We analyze human wisdom as a set of strategies for solving intractable problems-those outside the scope of analytic techniques-including both object-level strategies like heuristics [for managing problems] and metacognitive strategies like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, or context-adaptability [for managing object-level strategies]. We argue that AI systems particularly struggle with metacognition; improved metacognition would lead to AI more robust to novel environments, explainable to users, cooperative with others, and safer in risking fewer misaligned goals with human users. We discuss how wise AI might be benchmarked, trained, and implemented.

Recent Review from his lab:
Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition

All are welcome