Om wrote an interesting piece on what AI (whatever the term means - it's being used almost without meaning these days) has in store.. will it eradicate humanity. I'm on Om's side. He raises the more interesting point of what it does to humanity. (I believe AI not only has the potential to harm, it is already doing so. That's another discussion. The real existential threats at this point are global warming, nuclear weapons and pandemics.) You can ask questions of any technology. Let's focus on technologies that augment human capabilities.
The inventions of drawing and writing represented our first external memory systems. Plato believed writing would erode real communication. From his dialog between Socrates and Phaedrus:
And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
He goes on to compare written text with a painting
You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.
It's ironic that his dialogs only exist because they've been written down.
The external memory system of writing improved by going to paper and then to bound books and cheap books with the printing press. We had to learn how to read to access this memory system, but most societies feel that's an appropriate use of time.
I wouldn't be able to do much of anything without glasses - a human augmenting technology that uses a bit of grinding and the properties of glass to perform complex realtime optical computations to move my focal plane to where it should be.
In high school I learned how to use a slide rule to help with multiplication, division and trig functions. Little did I know it would give me an intuitive sense of how logarithms work along with vastly improving my ability to do mental approximations. I still find I'm more creative in early problem building if I'm sketching on a blackboard and using a slide rule rather than relying state of the art tools like Mathematica.
As a teenager I made use of the postal system to communicate with two mentors in what turned out to be one of the most important educational experiences I've experienced. The latency of the postal system turned out to be important as it gave more weight to each leg of the communication. A great deal of introductory math and physics is available online these days, but it would have been too easy and I would have probably learned at a superficial level.
My style of thinking turns out to be very visual and using my imagination, perhaps aided by some sketches and wrestling with equations by hand and visually in my mind gives more insight than visualization tools, although they can be very useful at later stages.
There's great value in thinking and creating. Making something out of wood with simple tools rather than ordering it premade or 3D printing it. Learning how to play a musical instrument rather than just listening. Communicating with a friend over time with pen, paper and the postal system rather than a video chat. And then you're doing your taxes (at least in the US), you're probably using a tax program on your computer. All of these involve augmenting technologies that have been created by someone else and all require different approaches. Enjoyment of the process and the final product may not be aligned and that can be a good thing.
Om and Bryan use photography to augment how they see the world around them. My sister does the same with her paint brushes and canvas as well as photography. All of these people use machine learning embedded in their cameras as part of the creative process, although they may carefully control its use.
There may be great value in using an LLM to help with a programing task or organizing information. If we're lucky we have the freedom to select the most appropriate technology for the task. But we should consider these choices carefully. What's bad is when a technology with bad side effects or even harm is used without our knowledge and consent.
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