Using AI on a query of any sort gives rise to some uncomfortable questions. Let’s leave aside its inaccuracies which could pop up anywhere. Instead, let’s just pretend it is perfect. It is low or zero cost and comes in an app on a device that most everyone has in personal possession.
It appears as if all human knowledge from every discipline is there for us instantly, even to the point of merely speaking and having it spit back the answer.
For an older generation that is already educated, already aware of the value of knowing without such tools, AI is an interesting innovation, one we can appreciate as a sparring partner, a date reminder, a method of jogging memory, or for filling in details and gaps in knowledge. I use it all the time, if only to deepen themes in writing or fact-checking.
It’s a great help.
But I worry. Will people in high school and college now see it this way? Or will they see it as a wonderful excuse for not knowing anything at all? This is my concern. We already saw this with the internet generally but at least that required some digging around and some effort to find that for which you are looking. We adapted.
This is different. AI creates the illusion of instantaneous knowledge of all things with the click of a button. I imagine myself at the age of 16 and try to recreate what I might have thought about the implications. It is all too easy to find excuses not to read, not to learn, not to write, not to research, not to know.
AI gives a billion reasons not to do these things. Why bother when a machine exists to do all your thinking for you?
This has caused me to think deeply about a fundamental question. What precisely is the value of knowing things? It is so that you can carry with you in your own mental possession the capacity to understand the world around you within a larger framework than merely what you experience with your senses. Knowledge combined with the wisdom of experience permits a deeper and broader interpretation of what is otherwise mere data.
In Husserl’s view, even the attempt to leap outside our own consciousness requires that we engage the only tool we have, which is our own understanding within our own minds. We can and should struggle to broaden and be emphatic but every effort is trapped within the framework of individual consciousness. We simply cannot think and fully step outside our brains. In his view, we should be honest about the way in which our subjectivity is the only lens through which we see that which is outside ourselves.
Given that view, and given the puzzles that AI presents, I decided to do an inventory of my own method of thinking in order to assess that fundamental question: Why learn anything at all?
I would never boast about my own capacity to understand because my brain is missing far more than it processes. Still, I’m deeply grateful for what I do know.
I can confidently say that I have a working knowledge map of probably 300 years of American history, with plenty of gaps of course but at least I know where they are and I strive constantly to fill them in. In terms of European history, I can map 500 years solidly and about 2,300 years more loosely.
In this framework, I can place a variety of features of the world: music, art, economic understanding, technology, religion, law, architecture, philosophy, and plenty of experience in commerce, household management, and several industries in which I’ve worked. On matters of science and languages, and on a series of side issues like sports, I have much less knowledge, which I greatly regret, though I do have a working knowledge of Latin and its derivative languages.
Again, I consider myself ill-educated as compared with many people I’ve known, but I’m deeply grateful for what I do know, what books and teachers have granted me, and the time I’ve spent to put it all together. I continue to do this daily, adding more pieces to the big puzzle, discovering more rooms and passages in the great castle of knowledge, and otherwise finding bits and pieces everywhere to add to my understanding of every one of these areas.
All without AI.
How do I gain from this? It’s pretty well constant in every area of life. I will just give a quick example. I walked into a small apartment lobby and it was obvious to me quickly from the detailing and infrastructure when the building came into being, or was at least redecorated in the early 1920s with its Art Deco feel. But I also knew that the wallpaper was anomalous, installed in the 1950s, and I knew that the bulbs were of course new and quite terrible.
It was obvious that the stairs banisters had been painted over by someone too lazy to refinish the wood, and that the stairs had original wood that was deeply worn. I knew the tiles on the floor were from the period and so were the light fixtures. I imagined the ways in which the restoration could take place for less than $10K. I say all of this with no practical knowledge of interior design, merely going off my existing knowledge of time and place plus some sense of the price system and product availability.
I could in an instant imagine the music that might have animated these halls at the time, and the clothing too, and the mix of technologies including the elevator that was working, and how the building was used. I know the technologies: the rise of the phonograph that brought recorded music into domestic spaces, the cameras that were recording life in stills that would become motion pictures without words, and the telephones that were just becoming available as a commercial product.
In other words, just from walking in, I could recreate all of this in my mind, more or less accurately I think, and without anyone telling me anything at all. And so long as we are talking 1923, I know who was president, the dominant issues of the time from Prohibition to the cultural estrangement of returning soldiers to the unresolved conflicts on the Continent.
Harding was president during the economic downturn of the time and did nothing about it, which was wise because it went away. I can tell you what was happening in Germany at the time (the great inflation) and Russia (war communism was ending and Lenin embarked on a liberalization).
I know the foreshadowing events of the Great War and the cultural demoralization that resulted, and the growing pains of urbanization and the gradual dissolution of the traditional family structures and marriage rituals. I can list for you the religious conflicts and the new fashion for liberalism and the tremendous upheaval that toggled between a revanchist desire to go back and the progressive embrace of the new, and how this conflict resolved itself in time.
All of this apparatus I carry with me, not so much as a matter of pride, but just as an apparatus I transport around like a duffle bag. It helps me understand my surroundings such that the world does not seem chaotic but vaguely explainable. It also prompts curiosity about that which I do not know and gives me a desire to dig deeper into the history and meaning of this space.
Can ChatGPT do this? Maybe, but how would one know what to search or how to begin knowing? To use AI requires that you know the right questions to ask. Even if there were a magical technology that narrates everything around us, how could we possibly filter out the signal-to-noise ratios? How can we find the core meaning and narrative to discover what all the chaos around us means?
My argument, really, is that it is better for these things to rattle around in our heads rather than being external to us. Knowledge created and sustained only by AI is like a dinner party on Zoom: It has might look similar but it is lacking in the meaning that comes from authenticity.
Outsourcing all our understandings to technology seems not only dangerous; it suggests a vastly lower quality of life. To learn, to discover, to know, to build your mental apparatus of understanding in a cumulative way is the pith of life itself. There is no technological replacement for this.
Maybe it seems strange to ask and answer such a fundamental question as: Why should we learn and know? But that’s where we are. We are surrounded by technologies that invite us to believe that it no longer matters. That is an enormous and fatal error.
