Why even try to develop knowledge and a broad vocabulary when AI can offer you the illusion of having acquired those things? I’m all for using available tools to discover and learn, tools that allow us to integrate new things into our repertoire of exchange and communication. But if we start hiding behind a facade built by and with AI, we’ll become puppets of the machine.
Erudition arrives quickly for those who are young and focused and considerably longer for those who are distracted and maybe a bit too hedonistic. Of course, society doesn’t want to spend time waiting for knowledge to arrive in people when the economy is measured in productivity that matters at the moment. We must all find our economic quotient quickly so the system can better assess our value and convince us to take on the financial burden of those things that help move money. The measure of GNP is more important than the measure of the quality of life, so the quicker one fakes it, the quicker the system believes you are “making it.” Artificial Intelligence allows us to chat with the accumulated knowledge of humanity and, therefore, in some way, absolves us from having to peel back the layers of discovery on our paths into intellectual acumen. The risk is that not only will we eschew book knowledge, but we may also forget to explore self-knowledge.
Know thyself is an ancient Greek maxim that served humanity well as it encouraged our species to then discover what serves us and unloads some of the burdens of physical existence, but that process of knowing has taken thousands of years to get us to where we’re at today. As we compress the time requirements to become learned with the assistance of electronic transformers buried in the machine of AI, will we correspondingly decouple the time demands from companies that exert pressure on our free time to self-explore? The sad answer is probably no, and for good reason: the average person would likely fritter away those gained moments on frivolous entertainment and mindlessly numb their senses to gain nothing, while those of us who’ve already placed a premium on learning and exploration will have to maintain the status quo because being in a minority doesn’t inspire the powers that be to afford special privileges to the few.
As the machine of AI enters the landscape, the human will gain an appearance of greater knowledge, meaning greater economic viability at an earlier age. This facade of intelligence becomes the body armor of the age and our smart machines become munitions for combat on the field of economic dominance. In an apparent second, humanity has discovered a new form of war gained by adorning ourselves with the fashions of GPT.