Philosophy and AI

Patron Dr Charlotte Blease is the author of Dr Bot, a new book exploring how AI can transform patient care by changing how healthcare works, making it more effective, ethical and responsive in ways humans alone cannot achieve.

Charlotte is Associate Professor (Docent) at the Participatory eHealth and Health Data Research Group at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Researcher at Digital Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.

As Patron of SAPERE (soon to be Thoughtful), I spend a lot of time thinking about the future we’re steering young people toward. And I’ll be blunt: we’re running out of time to pretend that AI is a niche issue.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a clever add-on to life as usual. It’s going to reshape jobs, decision-making, identity – even the way we think about healthcare, education and democracy. In my own research, and in my book Dr Bot, I explore how AI could revolutionise human systems that have failed for far too long. Used well, AI could save lives, widen access, and tackle global problems with a speed that humans simply can’t manage alone.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The same systems – if misused or uncritically adopted – could just as easily worsen inequality, burn through planetary resources, entrench bias, and make bad decisions at scale with false confidence.

So the question is not “Should AI be in schools?” — it’s “Will young people be ready for the world AI is creating?”

And that’s where philosophy comes in. Children need more than just digital literacy. They need philosophical literacy. They must be equipped to:

• Challenge the ethics behind the systems they’re asked to trust
• Spot manipulation and bias — whether from humans or machines
• Ask: Who benefits? Who is left out? What’s the trade-off?
• Stay autonomous in a world full of persuasive algorithms

This autumn, SAPERE is piloting a small but significant step in that direction. In partnership with STAR21, they’re testing an AI-supported coaching tool that helps facilitators reflect on their own practice – not to replace human judgement, but to sharpen it. Think of it as philosophical enquiry looking into a digital mirror.

AI doesn’t cancel the need for philosophy. It amplifies it.

If AI is going to shape the future, then we must ensure that the next generation are not passive recipients of that future – but active, questioning citizens who know how to think, not just how to click.

This is not an academic debate. It’s an urgent one. And I am proud to say that SAPERE is stepping up.