Artificial Intelligence, Human Knowledge, and the Public Good:

A CORE Academy Manifesto on the Human Conditions of Intelligence in the Age of AI

Authors: Piero Formica, Li Lei, and Raymond Jiarui Wu

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61362/CORE0621 

Download the full PDF version here: CORE Academy AI Manifesto.pdf

Published by CORE Academy (June 2026)

CORE Academy is pleased to publish Artificial Intelligence, Human Knowledge, and the Public Good: A CORE Academy Manifesto on the Human Conditions of Intelligence in the Age of AI, authored by Piero Formica, Li Lei, and Raymond Jiarui Wu. The Manifesto was inspired by and developed from an earlier reflection by CORE Academy Fellow Piero Formica, whose original text placed AI governance within a broader humanistic horizon, emphasizing human centrality, digital humanism in education, the quality of growth, and innovation beyond the limits of existing data.

The full text of the Manifesto is published below. Piero Formica’s earlier reflection is also available here as a related text: PIERO FORMICA x AI MANIFESTO.pdf

Preamble

Artificial intelligence is not merely a new instrument of calculation. It is a test of whether human beings can preserve the conditions of knowledge, judgment, responsibility, and public trust in an age of intelligent systems.

AI can calculate, classify, predict, simulate, interpret, generate, and optimize at a speed and scale never before available to humanity. It can advance scientific discovery, improve public services, support education, broaden access to knowledge, and help resolve global challenges in health, climate, energy, agriculture, culture, and the environment.

Yet the central question is not what AI can do. The deeper question is what human beings should become in relation to it.

If AI is treated only as a tool of efficiency, it may narrow the human horizon. If it is treated as an authority without accountability, it may weaken judgment. If it is treated as a substitute for knowledge, it may erode truth. If it is used without wisdom, it may reduce human beings to data objects, behavioral targets, or instruments of optimization.

Human beings must remain the moral subjects of AI, not its objects. CORE Academy affirms that AI governance is not merely the governance of machines. It is the defense and renewal of the human conditions under which intelligence remains wise, knowledge remains trustworthy, education remains liberating, and technology remains answerable to humanity.

I. Intelligence Beyond Computation

The rise of artificial intelligence compels us to reconsider what intelligence means.

Human intelligence is not merely computational. It is embodied, historical, cultural, emotional, ethical, imaginative, and social. It is shaped by memory, language, experience, empathy, intuition, and responsibility. It develops through encounter, doubt, attention, failure, conversation, and care.

AI systems may process language, but meaning lives in forms of life. They may generate arguments, but they do not inhabit the moral world in which arguments and decisions matter. They may assist decision-making, but they do not bear practical wisdom. They may simulate choice, but they do not carry responsibility.

The great traditions of thought remind us that intelligence is never merely the manipulation of symbols. It is bound to judgment, action, character, community, and the good. From Aristotle’s practical wisdom to Confucius’s union of learning, reflection, self-cultivation, and humane conduct, from Plato’s concern for wise governance to Wittgenstein’s insight that meaning belongs to use, human intelligence appears not as a mechanism alone, but as a way of living in the world.

The task, therefore, is not to subordinate human intelligence to machine efficiency. It is to augment human intelligence through AI systems that enlarge, rather than replace, the capacities of human beings.

AI should be a partner in inquiry, not a master of judgment.

II. Knowledge Before Output

The age of generative AI has made one critical distinction urgent: information is not yet knowledge.

AI can produce fluent language without understanding, persuasive images without fidelity to reality, references without verifiable sources, and confidence without truth. It can multiply output while weakening the conditions under which knowledge becomes credible.

Knowledge requires more than data and computation. It requires evidence, authorship, interpretation, citation, provenance, peer judgment, reproducibility, and responsibility. It requires institutions that protect inquiry, communities that sustain criticism, and persons who are willing to stand behind their claims.

For this reason, knowledge integrity must be central to AI governance.

AI must not dissolve the boundary between truth and fabrication. It must not flood the public sphere with synthetic authority. It must not weaken scholarly standards, obscure authorship, fabricate evidence, or reduce education and research to exercises in automated production.

AI can assist inquiry, but it must serve, not replace, the institutions, practices, and responsibilities that make knowledge trustworthy. The future of AI governance is therefore inseparable from the future of knowledge itself.

III. Education for Judgment

The word “school” carries an ancient promise. Its root, schole, once suggested time liberated for reflection, study, and conversation. Education, at its best, is not simply the transfer of information. It is the cultivation of attention, character, and judgment.

AI is already transforming education. It can personalize learning, support teachers, assist translation, open archives, explain difficult materials, and bring learning to those who have been excluded from it. Used wisely, it may become a companion to curiosity.

But education must not be reduced to prompt engineering, automated assessment, or the efficient delivery of standardized content. The purpose of education is not merely to produce competent users of tools. It is to cultivate persons capable of asking better questions, recognizing truth, caring for others, exercising judgment, and imagining futures not yet given.

The productivity algorithm accelerates the pace of life. The human mind, however, requires attention, rest, dialogue, silence, and time to wander. A civilization may gain speed while losing orientation.

We therefore need a digital humanism worthy of education. Students should learn not only how to use AI, but how to question it. They should understand how models are trained, how bias appears, how errors arise, how automated systems shape attention, and why independent thought must be protected in a world of persuasive machine outputs.

The ancient image of the peripatetic school remains instructive. Machines may learn through movement and experimentation, but they do not walk in the philosophical sense. They do not breathe the air of wonder. They do not ask what kind of life is worth living.

AI may accelerate instruction, but it must not impoverish education.

IV. AI for Science, Humanities, and Humanity

AI should serve the advancement of knowledge for the benefit of humanity.

AI for Science can deepen discovery, model complex systems, connect disciplines, and address shared challenges in medicine, climate, energy, materials, food systems, biodiversity, and public health.

AI for the Humanities can help preserve languages, historical records, cultural memory, artistic traditions, and digital cultural heritage. It can assist interpretation, translation, and public understanding, while reminding us that human meaning cannot be reduced to machine-readable patterns.

AI for Humanity must serve human dignity, social trust, open inquiry, inclusive development, and the public good. It should expand the capacity of societies to care, learn, discover, cooperate, and respond to crises.

These aspirations require more than technological ambition. They require open scientific cooperation, shared research infrastructure, responsible data practices, public literacy, and capacity-building across regions. AI must not become a new instrument of intellectual dependency through which some societies design the future while others merely consume it.

The benefits of AI should not be monopolized by a few countries, companies, or institutions, nor confined to a few dominant languages. AI governance must include smaller countries, developing regions, underrepresented disciplines, young scholars, and communities whose histories and knowledge are often absent from dominant datasets.

The future of AI should be a shared human project.

V. The AI Economy and Human Needs

AI is becoming part of the economic architecture of human life. Its capabilities are increasingly measured, priced, exchanged, and delivered through computation, data, model access, and tokens.

Tokens, understood here as units of computation, access, generation, and intelligent service, may become important economic units of the AI age. They may enter global systems of exchange, pricing, allocation, and value conversion. But tokens are not ends. They are instruments.

The fairness of the AI age will depend not only on access to devices and connectivity, but also on fair access to computation, data, models, tokens, and intelligent services. If these capacities are concentrated among a few countries, corporations, or platforms, AI may deepen the very divides it promises to overcome.

The token economy of AI must therefore be governed in light of human dignity, human needs, and the public good. It should help societies meet essential needs in health, education, food, energy, housing, care, and mobility, while widening opportunities for cultural participation, scientific discovery, and dignified work.

AI may complement financial public goods and digital public infrastructure by reducing transaction costs, widening access, improving allocation, and supporting more responsive public services. It may also substitute for certain informational and transactional functions within financial and administrative systems. But it must not replace the public responsibilities on which human welfare, trust, and social protection depend.

AI should not create an economy in which intelligence is abundant but human needs remain unmet. The measure of the AI economy is not how many tokens are traded, but how much human flourishing is made possible.

VI. The Boundaries of AI

AI should be powerful, but its power must have boundaries.

AI can optimize means. It cannot determine the ultimate ends of human life.

AI can generate language. It cannot replace the forms of life in which meaning is born.

AI can assist scientific discovery. It cannot decide what humanity ought to value.

AI can recommend action. It cannot assume moral responsibility.

AI can imitate styles of reasoning. It cannot bear conscience.

AI can help us discover what exists. It cannot exhaust the human capacity to imagine what does not yet exist.

The danger is not only that machines may become ever more powerful. The deeper danger is that human beings may learn to understand themselves only through the categories of machine efficiency.

A society that treats all things as data may lose sight of wisdom. A society that treats all judgment as prediction may weaken responsibility. A society that treats all knowledge as output may forget the patient disciplines by which truth is earned.

AI can optimize the known. Human imagination must remain free to discover the unknown.

VII. Responsibility, Safety, and the Public Good

The promise of AI cannot be separated from its risks.

As AI systems become more capable, autonomous, and widely accessible, their risks can no longer be understood only in terms of bias, privacy, or individual misuse. Frontier AI may lower the threshold for cyberattacks, biological misuse, large-scale deception, manipulation of public information, and disruption of critical infrastructure. AI agents may increase the speed and scale of harmful action before human institutions are prepared to respond.

These risks do not justify fear without reason. But they do demand vigilance, scientific assessment, institutional responsibility, and international cooperation.

AI systems with significant social consequences should be subject to meaningful human oversight, rigorous evaluation, responsible deployment, security safeguards, and clear lines of accountability. Where AI affects rights, education, health, employment, public institutions, scientific judgment, or collective safety, it must be reviewable, contestable, and answerable to human responsibility.

The governance of AI must join development with safety, innovation with accountability, openness with care, and freedom with the protection of human life.

AI should not be used to manipulate public reason, intensify surveillance, deepen discrimination, automate injustice, spread falsehoods, or enable catastrophic harm.

The public good must remain the ultimate measure of technological power.

VIII. The Role of the Academy

The academy has a special responsibility in the age of AI.

Governments can regulate. Companies can innovate. Technical communities can build. But academies, universities, learned societies, and research institutions must help humanity think.

They can convene disciplines that rarely meet. They can defend long-term inquiry against short-term incentives. They can protect knowledge from distortion, education from impoverishment, and public reason from manipulation. They can bring science and the humanities together in a shared conversation about the future of intelligence.

CORE Academy, as an international academy of the sciences and humanities, affirms that AI governance must be transdisciplinary, global, and humanistic. It must involve not only computer scientists and engineers, but also philosophers, historians, educators, economists, artists, physicians, legal scholars, social scientists, and citizens.

No single discipline can define intelligence. No single nation can govern AI alone. No single company should determine the horizon of human knowledge.

The academy’s task is to defend the human conditions under which technology remains in service to life, knowledge, dignity, peace, and the Earth.

Eight Affirmations

We therefore affirm:

1. Intelligence is not exhausted by computation.
        AI must enlarge human intelligence, not replace human judgment.

2. Knowledge is not exhausted by information.
        AI must strengthen evidence, authorship, provenance, criticism, and responsibility.

3. Education is not exhausted by instruction.
        AI must support the formation of judgment, imagination, attention, and moral responsibility.

4. Innovation is not exhausted by optimization.
        AI must leave room for curiosity, uncertainty, serendipity, and the discovery of the unknown.

5. Development is not exhausted by growth, nor is intelligence exhausted by exchange.
        The economy of AI, including the exchange of tokens and intelligent services, must serve human flourishing, dignified work, ecological responsibility, and the public good.

6. Safety is not opposed to progress.
        AI must be developed with foresight, accountability, and safeguards against high-consequence misuse.

7. Global cooperation is not optional.
        AI must be governed through open science, knowledge equity, capacity-building, and dialogue across civilizations.

8. Technology is not destiny.
        The future of AI must remain answerable to human dignity, human freedom, and human responsibility.

Closing Declaration

Artificial intelligence is becoming one of the defining forces of our age. But the future will not be decided by machines alone. It will be decided by the quality of human judgment brought to bear upon them.

We should not meet AI with fear alone, nor with fascination alone. We should meet it with wisdom, courage, humility, and responsibility.

The question before humanity is not whether machines will become more intelligent. They will. The question is whether human beings can become wiser.

For this reason, CORE Academy calls upon scholars, scientists, educators, innovators, institutions, and citizens to build an AI future worthy of knowledge, dignity, and the public good.

Technology must remain answerable to humanity.
Knowledge must remain worthy of trust.
Education must remain a path to judgment.
Intelligence must remain in the service of wisdom.
Human beings must remain the moral subjects of the AI age.
And the future must remain open to human responsibility.

Expressions of Support

CORE Academy welcomes expressions of support from scholars, scientists, educators, and colleagues who share the broad principles of the Manifesto. Those who wish to publicly express support may download the Expression of Support Form and return the completed form to the CORE Academy Secretariat at secretariat@coreacad.org. 

Download the Expression of Support Form here: 

Expressions of Support for the CORE Academy AI Manifesto.docx

Expressions of Support for the CORE Academy AI Manifesto.pdf

About the Authors

Piero Formica is a Fellow of the International Core Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the Division of Social Sciences. His work has long explored innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge creation, and the human future of learning and society.

Li Lei is a Member of the Executive Board of the International Core Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Raymond Jiarui Wu is the Executive Vice Secretary-General of the International Core Academy of Sciences and Humanities.