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Michael Gibson's avatar

There are also upsides to the current state of AI. I work with exceptional young people on the edge of science and tech, and what I can see is that for the autodidact, it is now much easier than ever before to get to the frontier of knowledge in a field.

Any freedom of will or self-reliance worth wanting isn't an on-off switch. As though some animals have it, or they don't. It seems more likely that it comes in degrees and is not a permanent state won and thereafter kept with no effort, but a fitness that must be maintained.

Some institutions will foster it and support it, some won't. We can all agree on that--Emerson included, though he did have a penchant for antinomianism in all things.

What I find surprising is the hidden assumption that you believe schools prior to the invention LLMs inculcated epistemic self-reliance. The Great Stagnation (or Innovation Starvation, if you will), may have been caused by the end of the Cold War, or even over-regulation, but one main factor surely was our education system from top to bottom. And money or more teachers wasn't the issue. We simply don't know how to educate most people. This is the age of blood-letting.

Let me have the temerity to add my own reading to that scene in the Diamond Age: what Finkle-McGraw is saying is that creativity is not IQ, nor robotic mastery of past achievements, nor ascention through a hierarchy of prestige. It is a separate faculty, as Wordsworth in his Prelude suggests. In the psychology of creativity to date, researchers at basically at a loss. There is no predictive test--like an IQ test--that can measure a person's creativity. All we have are case studies of creative people. We do not know how John and Paul became the Beatles or how Einstein became Einstein. They can tell us what they did and maybe something of their process, but it's a mystery when it comes to learning from them or what they learned that others in their classes didn't.

Our education system has always been blind, and I would say inimical, to this faculty. That's been a far bigger problem for longer than children cheating on their essays.

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Laurence Brevard's avatar

This gave me some useful perspective about this current round of "AI." I've lived through at least two prior ones - including in 1984-1988 when my work computer was a Lisp Machine.

As a (comfortably retired) EE in technical software - mostly Electronic Design Automation - who first got paid to program in 1967, I regularly get asked about computer technology by people who watch too much "news" on the TV (which I gave up about 20 years ago).

I tell (or remind) a lot of them about Eliza. I personally see most of today's "AI" as either its successor or, worse, son of Clippy! I treat "AI" answers roughly like all search results (and Wikipedia) - a source of pointers, many wrong, but some of which can be useful.

I've yet to try "AI" as leverage for programming (son of IntelliSense?) but find that a bit intriguing. Software automation has been an unfulfilled dream of mine for over 50 years.

I try to avoid the idiot chat bots (ubiquitous on web sites now) and have little interest in ChatGPT (which autocorrect tried to turn into catgut!) and its ilk.

The "AI" that I use is in roughly three things: (1) speaker independent voice recognition and response - "Echo, set the heat pump to 72" and (2) increasingly powerful "satellite" navigation systems, which I use regularly for traffic based routing decisions and (3) language translation HELPING with my not-so-good German and Spanish.

ANYWAY... Your piece also goaded me into finally paying for Niall Ferguson's Substack! So there!

At 77 I don't have children and am unlikely to do so but my friends who do (generally with grandchildren now) are dealing with this issue on a regular basis.

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