Man, in the exploration of the term in its most wholistic comprehension, has been on a long path to the present. Each time we, collectively, pause to consider the “present” that we occupy, we attempt to encapsulate essential questions that only humans on earth seem to contemplate. Over the recent past, either by bracketing the essence of “recent past” as the past few centuries or the past few decades, we have collectively been breathing air in a world that punches out understandings, data, images, and decisions from a scientific perspective. Most recently those emissions have come from an AI machine. This has been an arrangement we, collectively, have embraced wholeheartedly when measured by the AI systems of assessment, algorithms. But, for you personally, and then perhaps contemplatively for us collectively, could we be better off finding and offering solutions with a pencil in our hand?
Or, one could also ask on this fine morning, what is the most important thing to consider at this early hour. A plausible answer could be that fresh cup of coffee about to burst through the top of our Bialetti. Stay tuned.
Back to the problem with algorithms….. Man loves to study man. We have been doing it as long as man has distinguished us from other animals and began to figure out ways of outsmarting those animals that could benefit or threaten him. He has, unfortunately, left myriad examples outside of his purview through either his inability to recognize either the threat or the possibilities of that other living thing may offer us. Or, he chose to make a decision given to him by the collective response because of a misappropriated or misinformed existential justification. Or, the overwhelming need for personal benefit had been perceived by compliance. That we have so many cultural options— languages, religions, icons, tastes, etc.— is the marvel of the history of this world and our understanding of it. Each human must navigate the validity of the information given to her as soon as she becomes cognizant of the power, and the threat, associated with the maturity to distinguish “right from wrong” on an adult level. So many of us fail.
One of our species’ wonderful distinctions is the ability to record our impressions in ways that allow us to communicate with our other likeminded humans. We are so interested in how we think that we continue to pursue the artifacts fashioned by earlier humans who roamed the earth many millennia ago. How long ago was it when we first figured out how to scratch or paint some line or icon on a surface to cast into the future, the purpose of which at that time was for someone else to react to what was conveyed in the marks. A payment, a pledge, or even a reaction to what had happened that day could have been the meaning of the inscriptions. It is a marvel that we can peer into the mind of a human who lived ten to twenty millennia before us, and perhaps even know his name.
But, where are we today in this continuum? How is the collective “pulse” of the world from a human perspective doing, and how can the simple individual of today manage all the data, images and pronouncements thrown her way at an ever-increasing rate. We now are reminded, or prodded, by a bing on the phone or tablet. Perhaps we even feel a tactile reminder that announces a distance achieved or a heart rate occurring from a recent exercise. All of these recent benefits now allowed us have occurred on the back end of the current digital world. This leads us to the one of the continuing major conundrums of our collective existence; what is human consciousness, how can we measure and understand it, and can we replicate it?
This is what the genius of Allen Turing contemplated. His ability to come up with binary options that can build impressions into the billions of offerings has allowed us to create those algorithms that measure and manipulate us in our modern age. When he was charged with tackling the Enigma machine, developed by the Germans prior to the Second World War, he had to overcome the complexity of its possibilities by simplification and deduction. Binaries were his answer, as he sought to understand the very workings of the human brain. Since that time, only a couple or three generations’ ago, we can now measure parts of the brain and determine with some acuity what is happening in that part of the brain and whether the thought we seek is happening in that portion of the brain. In some cases, the machines available to “observe” these workings can do it in real time. Digitization and algorithms have brought us to the very precipice of peering into our consciousness. Now take a look at what AI is up to…..
Almost within the time it takes one of us to come up with a theme or issue to discern, and look for some form of written resolution associated with the many factors driving such issue, a new artificial intelligence. AI, let’s use GPT-4 as a current example of such an AI apparatus— the linked article was written in November of 2022 and since that time much has happened in the frenetic pace of AI development—is offering us previously unbelievable options in the composition of such powerful thoughts.
These new AI platforms, a phrase that has to take into account billions of data points per second, huge batteries of machines to compute them and a backlog of collected data that can now be sourced, sorted, reconstructed and recomputed to spit out a “beautiful” representation of written work that complements work that a person of some lofty academic stature might produce.
Academics has long had the charge of preparing the next generation for contemplating, maneuvering and shaping the world. The next politician, mathematician, scientist, doctor, artist, poet or engineer has been scrubbed by the academic world to give him or her the applicable tools, both in mental understanding and the ability to manipulate tactilely, to advance the benefits of living in our physical world. Medicine, the arts, all the applications associated with the STEM world, have grown more essential in today’s world. Because we have been able to manipulate this binary choice world with such aplomb, we can make machines that complete critical decision-making applications in a way that simulate and often outperform human capabilities in both time and efficacy.
These “machines” have come ever closer to simulating the human ability to complete tasks like picking tomatoes, driving a vehicle, diagnosing an illness, assisting in an operation, reminding us to finish something unfinished, line up options for future choices we might make, that each of us is now becoming our own part of the earth’s humongous algorithm. We each “look” different on this huge chart, yet we are grouped with all the other like-minded, like-behaving humans and have become commoditized, perhaps not unlike those “humans” tapped in the film, The Matrix, to run the world’s batteries. Indeed, when one enters into that world, we could even be fooled into thinking we are communicating with, or are in some way perceiving the data offerings of another human being when it is actually an algorithm spewing data at us in hopes of attracting us into its web.
These new CHAT programs are changing the world. They are giving us a better understanding of the differences between thinking and speaking and can show us where in one’s brain this difference is measured. What this also points out is that the CHAT algorithms do not discern consciousness to a degree that we can turn over thinking and writing about the most important decisions we face. At the very least, social historians and educators are going to spend an immense amount of time, effort and funding to address the changes in society that will occur.
No longer can an educator assign an essay that will demonstrate, and prove, a student’s ability to think critically. The up side is that education will finally have to deal with what really is knowledge and how a person is and becomes “wise”. It must also be noted by educators that language is only one of the factors by which the educational systems of the world can assess who is among society’s leader contributors.
Creative writing and literature classes have always had to address biases by particular educators, and pointing out the historical analysis of when and how languages changes is useful on so many levels. What is the purpose of grammar and constructing a “proper” essay? We may have just entered into a new era, like when humans invented movable type, or Xeroxing, or word recognition abilities of a computer software platform. What used to take time and space has now utilized that time and space at inhuman speeds to construct very useful additions to the writing of languages in many businesses. But, plagiarism and authenticity have both been sorely strained in the process. Educators are going to have to work very, very hard to come up with understanding, assessing tools to legitimize authentic and creatively superlative work.
Can education benefit from returning to the pencil? What would this mean? The advent of the internet predicted the end of paper as a storage method. Nice try. What we have now is terms like terabytes and a yottabyte. Will we ever need more than one yottabyte, and when will there be a machine to hold one and manipulate it? What will that mean to “life”? It will take the next Allen Turing to confront the nature of meaning in that question, but we humans have never ducked the questions of “why is there air?” Or how did the universe begin? Or what is the very nature of consciousness? We are one for three thanks to Bill Cosby, but look where that got him in history.
There are other important questions and can you still listen to that Youtube clip and not be driven to another part of your brain concerning Cosby? How should education deal with this and so many other issues that define how we humans act, perceive, create and record what is important in history to maintain that continuous record of our achievements?
If you contemplate putting a pencil, or a piece of chalk, or a quill in Leonardo’s hand, what happens in his mind? (He actually only had two of these three options available to him) We should also consider what happened in the process of drawing when he was 20 as compared to when he was 50. Thanks to the prolific nature of this man’s mind, contrasted to the dearth of his finished projects, we use him often to formulate an example of a Renaissance Man in his Vitruvian Man drawing. We can follow much of the trajectory of his mind from the myriad projects he contemplated and developed. The final copy of the drawing was surely worked out over time and many attempts using a chalk crayon or some utensil that produced a line. As noted, it was not done with a pencil at any time in his life, though. How would da Vinci have reacted to a pencil? Would his brain have created a bit differently? What would he have done with a modern digital stylus and an IPad? These are the questions man can and should pose. One thing is for sure, if you Google the question of what is the best digital stylus, you are going to sold a solution to that question. Commoditization and capitalism….other topics to consider.
But every Kindergarten class should begin to address these problems and given as free a rein as possible. What is the nature of art, of color, of a horizon line, of the meaning of producing an image on paper that has a different creative process associated with it than a digital IPad. Or does it? Great artists envy the naive nature of children’s work. That creative process is literally being demonstrated at a base level. In what ways should we adults interfere? Rules and parameters are only assessments of a particular kind.
The CHAT 6.O or 9.O that will come at some time in the near future will take all of these linguistic rules, parameters and examples and come up with ever more clever representations of wonderful literate productions. The changes coming are inevitable. Take a look at how some of our better thinkers are trying to assess this change by clicking on the links below. Each click is a separate blog, which may happen in this space in the future. For now, it is a few days since that first coffee started this blog and it is time for a grind of the bean and our Bialetti to do its dance again. Ciao
Assignment for CHAT AI: Describe the best example of a metaphor for the color blue in 100 words or less in iambic pentameter.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/01/ai-is-not-the-new-crypto/672746/
https://pub.towardsai.net/what-is-gpt-4-and-when-9f5073f25a6d
https://uxplanet.org/gpt-4-facts-rumors-and-expectations-about-next-gen-ai-model-52a4ddcd662a
Counter issue. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/24/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-jobs-economy
Maine Musing 