This video is a wonderful discussion of what it will mean to offload knowledge and wisdom to machines. Professor Asma discusses how humans have <i>always</i> offloaded to the environment to a certain degree. He argues that offloading to LLMs is like <iq>the man in Searle's Chinese Room</iq>. I think that this offloading of knowledge and still believing that it would be a path to wisdom already began with the "just Google it" generation. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ePI8zckNu8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3ePI8zckNu8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Professor Asma" caption="AI and the Post-Knowledge World"> The trend toward offloading knowledge---a little something called "deliberate ignorance" in the good, old days---is paired with a not-insignificant trend toward anti-intellectualism. Knowing things isn't cool. If you know too much, then you're a "nerd." Look at who's popular out there in what many would call the real world: the <i>dumbest people</i> have millions and millions of subscribers and likes and billions and billions of views for the most stultifying, inane, and soul-sucking <i>content</i> while well-produced and equally visually stimulating video essays---I'm pretty sure he uses AI to generate the little animations peppered throughout--- by professors of logic and philosophy like Professor Asma garner 131 views and 26 likes. Asma cites other examples, like how people don't know how to navigate without an electronic map anymore---even to the point of not being able to navigate by landmarks, by observing the environment. He talks about students who can't read Macbeth---because it's too <i>hard</i>---who then think that having read the summary on Wikipedia means that they "know" Macbeth. <h>You do it to <i>learn your craft</i></h> The point of a student reading Macbeth isn't for the student to bequeath the world one more interpretation of that play. They read and analyze that play because we already know the myriad interpretations of it and can therefore use it as a <i>metric</i> to determine the skill of the student in reading and interpreting a work. Once that skill level is ascertained, you have a level of trust that the interpretation delivered by that person on a <i>work unknown to you</i> will be <i>competent</i>. Or is that too rational for everyone? Did we forget what education even means? We apply the same process in myriad other places but people don't seem to put two and two together. when it comes to a general education You're to build a wooden toolbox in shop not because the world needs a wooden toolbox but because you need to learn how to build things according to spec. The toolbox is a way of determining the amount of trust I should give you when I ask you to build something I actually need. It's the same in programming: I don't need another calculator; I need to know how well you can build one. And it's also the same for hobby projects: anyone trying to hone their skills tries their hand at a blog, or a parser, or a game engine---at least, everyone <i>used to do this</i>---but these new versions are rarely going to be more useful than existing versions.<fn> They are projects that help you <i>learn your craft</i>. <h>You need it to <i>do useful things</i></h> Coming back to Macbeth: while reading Shakespeare may give you insight into the human condition---he touched on pretty much every foible we had then and we still have them all today---but the main purpose is just to make you better and quicker at comprehension, interpretation, and assimilation of difficult material. When you're confronted with a 14-page technical paper describing the work that needs to be done, you will <i>be able to do it</i>. <img attachment="visualization_of_searle_s_chinese_room.jpg" align="left" caption="Visualization of Searle's Chinese room">The counterargument is that no-one needs any of this anymore because LLMs will always be there to do all of that for us now. But then, <i>what does the world need you for?</i> What value are you bringing to the table? You're just the little person in Searle's Chinese room, accepting inputs, plugging them in, and returning outputs, having added no value to that interpretive chain. Or, as Asma put it, <iq>you'll just be a cog that's happily moving information from here to here, without understanding any of it.</iq> What's the argument that you should be included in that team or effort when anyone else could do it just as well, using the same tools? That is, at any rate, the argument from a person [yours truly] who's spent his life doing the <i>exact opposite of being a cog.</i> But maybe many people would read that previous paragraph and think, "way to go, Mr. Ivory Tower, you finally figured out how the rest of us have been doing everything all along." Maybe these laments all come far too late and LLMs are just the industrialization and culmination of a trend that's been long in the making. <h>Offshoring your mind</h> At <b>11:15</b>, Asma says, <bq><b>That will be the ultimate offshoring of your mind</b> to basically the needs of probably companies probably multinational companies and politics and you'll be left I guess to just entertain yourself which sounds pretty sweet, <b>until you realize you don't really know anything.</b></bq> Or maybe you don't realize it at all! I mean, how could you? You're by definition no longer really capable of realizing anything. But that also makes you really easy to entertain! The algorithm will <i>easily</i> be able to come up with content to keep you entertained until you get sleepy. Why am I even using the future tense to describe this scenario? TikTok and co. are already here. I think perhaps Professor Asma is betraying his predilection for knowledge---which I share!---and thinking that he is playing Cassandra, predicting a dystopia, whereas what he described is what many, many people who swim with the strong currents of society already experience: unending propaganda that trains them to think of what they're experiencing as a utopia. <h>Consciousness is more than knowing answers</h> At <b>17:30</b>, Asma says <bq>Wosniak said you're too in your head with a Turing Test. It's too much about language-use and not enough about real-life or practical wisdom. So, he said, <b>the only way to really know if a computer has achieved consciousness is for it to basically make a cup of coffee.</b> So, put the AI in a robot and have it basically make a cup of coffee from scratch because that requires it to <b>solve all these practical problems that are embodied problems.</b></bq> He goes on to say that even people don't actually figure out how to make coffee on their own---they're taught to do it. But I think another point is that, even people who think that they know how to make coffee on their own, are still assuming that they're going to get beans from somewhere, and that someone has roasted them, and that someone has made potable water appear somewhere in their vicinity---in many cases coming straight from a tap in their homes. <h>What does "from scratch" even mean?</h> I have a brother-in-law who roasts his own beans and that is <i>lot of work</i> when you're doing it with a small machine or manually in a pan. He now has a big machine that does it much more quickly and pretty much in industrial batches---but who built the machine? Who built the parts? Who built the tools that made the machines that made those parts? Who built the tools that made the parts that built the machine that made the tools that made the parts for the machine? Who extracted the raw materials for the parts? Who built the tools to build the machines that helped them extract those materials? Who built the machines that produced the parts for those machines? Who built the energy infrastructure that made it possible to run the machines? The grid? The parts for the grid? The maintenance system for it? The shipping lanes that brought those parts and machines and tools and raw materials to you? Who built the infrastructure to ensure that fossil fuels were where they needed to be when they needed to be there for extracting those materials? What does "from scratch" even mean? <h>What of embodied skills or practical wisdom?</h> At <b>23:00</b>, Asma says, <bq><b>It's a very strange disconnect people are having between the digital world they're living in most of the time now, and the real world.</b> And I think we're starting to see more and more of this. So, every once in a while, reality punches through the simulacrum or the matrix we're living in all the time on our screens. And we're not ready for it. We're not trained to handle it. We don't know what to do with it. We fall over ourselves. We get bit in the face by some animal because we thought, 'hey on TV they're so cute.' You know, this is---it's a kind of madness. This is what Jean Baudrillard called the simulacrum. And it's going to be fine if the simulacrum continues unabated. <b>Because you could probably go to your grave living in this sort of mimicked world of reality, of screens.</b> But, if the grid goes down and the simulacrum ends, what's it going to be like then? <b>Are we going to have any skills---embodied skills or practical wisdom?</b> Are we going to be able to do any of the theoretical stuff like computations, logic, math? Are we going to know any science? <b>Or are we becoming such cogs in the machine in this Chinese room I'm describing that we won't know how to handle the real world</b> at all when there's a collapse of the simulacrum? Okay, that's kind of a frightening place to end. Think about it though! And maybe get off your screens. Never fail to watch Professor Asma's guide to unusual knowledge, though. Make sure that that's a weekly thing for you. But otherwise, <b>get outside into the sunshine and touch grass</b>, as the kids would say.</bq> Professor Asma really makes me think. His videos keep getting better and better. It's very holistic thinking. The work of a philosopher is to show deeper relations between seemingly unrelated things in the hope that we can learn something useful from them. These videos deliver in spades. <hr> <ft>The blog I'm writing this on right now can trace its pedigree to the late 1990s, when I built it not only to hone my skills but also because, at the time, none of the tools I wanted even existed.</ft>