Curiosity, courage, challenge

“You’re like an untrained LLM; you don’t have enough data to model the world! Let alone understand what I am saying.”  

I overheard a mom say that to her teenager at a local coffee shop. They were standing in line and the teen was attempting to make a bold generalization about the state of things. This same teenager later commented that knowing math is a waste, when “you can simply ask your phone what’s 4000 divided by 12”. 

It made me think, if students are relying on AI to provide them with information as needed are they foregoing actual learning? An MIT Media Lab study found that 83.3% of people who used ChatGPT to write an essay could not quote a single sentence from their work just minutes later. So are students who rely on AI really able to retain any learnings? Or are they simply developing the skills to have AI generate information for them?  Rather than reading literature, understanding math, studying history and culture. And using that knowledge to building things, they simply ask AI what to do. I have to admit, he was proving his mom’s point.  

But then every new technology—from writing, to the printing press, to adding machines and later computers has been met with the response this will simply make future generations stupid. Socrates felt writing to would destroy human memory. (At the time students of Homer’s could recite the entire Iliad from memory.) 

Curiosity

Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder if this signaled a loss in our collective curiosity. Today’s world is viewed for the most part through a 6” screen. Which is only slightly smaller than a page from paperback. But unlike a paperback, social media curates what appears on the next page. Having measured your explicit and implicit responses to the current page, and using its algorithms its not trying to create a narrative arc that relies on your imagination or personal reflection to craft a story, indeed its trying to do the opposite to keep you engaged. 

I cannot help but wonder, do the members of social network/AI generation have enough individualized knowledge in their heads, enough experiences, stories, inspirations internally with which to model their response to the world? Other than what has been provided to them by their digital feed what stories can they build on to create their own? Or are they dependent on an extractive technology (one that monetizes their attention) to give their lives meaning? 

What internal inspirations will fuel their imaginations. What will spark their subconscious when they have a moment to pause? What random memory will spark their creativity? A novel they read? A painting they say? Or a movie? Perhaps that time in the woods with their friends?  If one’s life experiences are mediated and curated by algorithms what have you lived? 

Courage

But the rise of AI is just the latest in the push for speed. We have all lost patience. A core part of creativity is time, ideas have to gestate, ferment, grow. Most of the time you have to sit with an idea for a while before its reached a state where it can stand on its own. But in our “I need it now”, “30 mins or its free”, Amazon Prime, world, no one has the courage to wait. The lightbulb was invented in 1802 by Humphry Davy but the filament kept burning out, 40 years later Warren de la Rue used platinum for the filament but the cost was prohibitive. Finally in 1879 Charles Batchelor & Francis Upton discovered carbonized cotton. (Edison simply owned the lab.) The point is creativity takes time.

Challenge

I know from my own experience that helicopter parents rarely allow their kids to figure things out on their own. Never permitting to stay outside until the street lights came on. Shuttling them from practice to school to activity to home and then to a friend’s house where another set of helicopter parents sequestered them from the world, preferring they stare at their little screen while their friends do the same. 

Past generations had the neighborhood, the woods, and as latchkey kids no one but their own sense of self preservation kept kept from learning the price of FAFO—an then only after finding out the hard way a few times.  

With only social media and online games I cannot help but feel their understanding of the world, while shared with their peers, is so small and insulated. I cannot help but wonder; will they be curious and courageous in the face of challenges or will they simply watch it unfold on their little screens?