Last summer, a piece of artwork generated with artificial
intelligence took a first prize at the Colorado State Fair. To me, the image
looks like a view from the back of the stage at an opera. You see the backs of
three singers, then, past them, vague squiggles and forms that may or may not
be an audience, and all around, dominating everything, the fantastical Lord of
the Rings-style palace where they are performing.
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The artwork looks cool at first glance, but after a second, it
feels kind of lifeless.
“As I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I
found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted,” L.M. Sacasas wrote
in his newsletter on technology and culture. “This happened when I began to
inspect the image more closely. As I did so, my experience of the image began
to devolve rather than deepen.”
This is what many of us notice about art or prose generated by
AI. It is often bland and vague. It is missing a humanistic core. It is missing
an individual person’s passion, pain, longings and a life of deeply felt
personal experiences. It does not spring from a person’s imagination, bursts of
insight, anxiety, and joy that underlie any profound work of human creativity.
This is what many of us notice about art or prose generated by AI. It is often bland and vague. It is missing a humanistic core. It is missing an individual person’s passion, pain, longings and a life of deeply felt personal experiences.
This points to what could be the core reality of the coming AI
age. AI will probably give us fantastic tools that will help us outsource a lot
of our current mental work. At the same time, AI will force us humans to double
down on those talents and skills that only humans possess. The most important
thing about AI may be that it shows us what it can’t do, and so reveals who we
are and what we have to offer.
If, say, you are a college student preparing for life in an AI
world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that
machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? You probably want
to avoid any class that teaches you to think in an impersonal, linear,
generalized kind of way — the kind of thinking AI will crush you at. On the
other hand, you probably want to gravitate toward any class, in the sciences or
the humanities, that will help you develop the following distinctly human
skills:
A distinct personal voiceAI often churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose
that is found in corporate communications or academic journals. You will want
to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom
Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive
and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own.
Presentation skills
“The prior generation of information technology favored the
introverts, whereas the new AI bots are more likely to favor the extroverts,”
George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes. “You will need to be
showing off all the time that you are more than ‘one of them.’” The ability to
create and give a good speech, connect with an audience, and organize fun and
productive gatherings seem like a suite of skills that AI will not replicate.
AI is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional.
A childlike talent for creativity“When you interact for a while with a system like GPT-3, you
notice that it tends to veer from the banal to the completely nonsensical,”
Alison Gopnik, famed for her studies on the minds of children, observes.
“Somehow children find the creative sweet spot between the obvious and the
crazy.” Children, she argues, do not just imitate or passively absorb data;
they explore and create innovative theories and imaginative stories to explain
the world. You want to take classes — whether they are about coding or painting
— that unleash your creativity, that give you a chance to exercise and hone
your imaginative powers.
Unusual worldviewsAI can be just a text-prediction machine. AI is good at
predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being
unpredictable, departing from the conventional. Stock your mind with worldviews
from faraway times, unusual people and unfamiliar places: Epicureanism,
stoicism, Thomism, Taoism, etc. People with contrarian mentalities and
idiosyncratic worldviews will be valuable in an age when conventional thinking
is turbo-powered.
EmpathyMachine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral
patterns across populations. It is not great for understanding the unique
individual right in front of you. If you want to be able to do this, good
humanities classes are really useful. By studying literature, drama, biography,
and history, you learn about what goes on in the minds of other people.
If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a
more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast
masses of data about no one in particular.
Situational awarenessA person with this skill has a feel for the unique contours of
the situation she is in the middle of. She has an intuitive awareness of when
to follow the rules and when to break the rules; a feel for the flow of events;
a special sensitivity, not necessarily conscious, for how fast to move and what
decisions to take that will prevent her from crashing on the rocks. This
sensitivity flows from experience, historical knowledge, humility in the face
of uncertainty, and having led a reflective and interesting life. It is a kind
of knowledge held in the body as well as the brain.
If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast masses of data about no one in particular.
The best teachers teach themselves. When I think back on my own
best teachers, I generally don’t remember what was on the curriculum, but
rather who they were. Whether the subject of the course was in the sciences or
in the humanities, I remember how these teachers modeled a passion for
knowledge, a funny and dynamic way of connecting with students.
They also modeled a set of moral virtues — how to be rigorous
with evidence, how to admit error, how to coach students as they make their own
discoveries. I remember how I admired them and wanted to be like them. That’s a
kind of knowledge you’ll never get from a bot.
And that is my hope for the age of AI — that it forces us to
more clearly distinguish the knowledge that is useful information from the
humanistic knowledge that leaves people wiser and transformed.
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