This is a homepage for the projects growing out of the book: Smarter Planet or Wiser Earth? How Dialogue Can Transform Artificial Intelligence into Collaborative Wisdom by Gray Cox. Besides all the usual places books are sold, a Creative Commons version of it is available here –y también en español aqui.
The aim here is to advance socio-technical systems of AI which are wiser, not just more efficient and “smarter”. They should balance all the relevant values to make life more just, convivial, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually nourishing. This requires an expansion of the conceptions of rationality used in AI technology as well as in mainstream economics, politics, and ethics by drawing on contemporary research on negotiation, conflict transformation, peacemaking, and other traditions of collaborative reasoning for ethical choice. To respond effectively to threats from ecological collapse, climate change, wars of mutually assured destruction, and out of control technology, we need systematically wiser ways to reason in our daily lives and collectively transform our dominant institutions.
Here is some further recent research extending ideas of the book as well as presentations of it in other media:
“From Control to Relationship: A Peace Studies Approach to AI Alignment, with Evidence from Multi-Model Dialogue”, under final review for forthcoming special issue of AI Magazine, 2026, preprint available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uqz5o6tYrnwGQzAOlqSuVfUza4WshI04/view?usp=sharing
“Dialogical Reasoning for Multi-Agent System Safety: A Peace Studies Paradigm and Empirical Test of the Viral Collaborative Wisdom Hypothesis”, forthcoming in The Proceedings of the MASST 2026 AAAI Symposium, 2026, preprint available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WEkPwI0bECaM15diJdO2Pf6kKhXfAis8/view?usp=sharing
“Dialogical Reasoning Across AI Architectures: A Multi-Model Framework for Testing AI Alignment Strategies”, January 2026, arXiv. The paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20604 with supplementary materials at: https://github.com/jgraycoxcoa/vcw-multi-ai-dialogue
“Exploring CA (Cellular Automata) tools for modelling Dialogical Reasoning”, Wolfram Community Post, July 2025, https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/3497077
“Beyond ‘Autocomplete on Steroids”: Testing a Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Some Emergent Features of Intentionality in LLMs”, in David C. Wyld et al. (Eds): CAIML, ICAIT, ITCSE, CRYPIS, NLCA – 2024 pp. 01-17, 2024. – CS & IT – CSCP 2024, https://aircconline.com/csit/papers/vol14/csit141801.pdf DOI: 10.5121/csit.2024.141801
Video lectures, podcasts, interviews, and further publications based on the book are linked on the media page here.
Initial praise: “. . . not simply a treatise of where we are but a prescription on how we can achieve the better outcome. What a wonderful world we might live in if everyone took a dose of this medicine.”– Katie Wasserman, AI consultant for Wall Street corporations
“ . . . encouraging all of us to step up and be part of creating a Wiser Earth . . . a must read for those who are looking for ways to make things better.” — Fred Benson, US Army Colonel retired, former Vice President for the Weyerhaeuser Company
“We may never be able to create machines in our own image, but perhaps we can engineer machines to reflect and respect our values. This book is a guide to what that image of ourselves could be.” – Rich Hilliard, software engineer
To hear the Songs for a Wiser Earth included in the book, listen here.
For Appendices to the book and other resources, go here.
The book is published by Quaker Institute for the Future and Producciones de La Hamaca and is available at standard booksellers online like Barnes and Noble or Amazon as a paperback or Kindle and will soon be released as a hardback and in audio form. It can also be downloaded in a free pdf as a Creative Commons version here.
For more information about Gray Cox, see his current CV here and his homepage here. He can be contacted directly at gray@coa.edu or #1-207-460-1163.