A prereminiscence: It’s like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.
It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. Soon after it was doing it pretty well and you watched it with admiration as if it were a dog balancing on a ball. Then soon it could do it well enough for most purposes, you couldn’t help but admit. Then as good as all but the best, even to those who could tell the difference. And then we were suddenly all wet, gathering our remaining picnic and heading for higher ground, not only completely outclassed but even unable to judge by how far we were being outclassed. Once a chess machine can beat everybody every time, who is left to applaud when it gets twice again as good?
If it had been a war, we would have had a little ceremony as we brought down our flag and folded it up and put it away, but because it happened as quickly and quietly as it did and because we weren’t sure whether we wanted to admit it was happening, there was no formal hand-off. One day we just resignedly realized we could no longer matter much, but there was so much more now to appreciate and we could see echoes and reflections of ourselves in it, so we didn’t put up a fight.
Every once in a while someone would write an essay, Joan Didion quality, really good. Or write a song. Poignant, beautiful, original even. Not maybe the best essay or the best song we’d seen that day, but certainly worthy of being in the top ranks. And we’d think: we’ve still got it. We can still rally when we’ve got our backs to the wall. Don’t count us out yet. But it was just so hard, and there was so much else to do. And so when it happened less and less frequently, we weren’t surprised.
And our curiosity left us, too. We half-remembered a time when we would have satisfied curiosity by research and experiment (words that increasingly had the flavor of “thaumaturgy,” denoting processes productive though by unclear means). But nowadays curiosity is déclassé. It suggests laziness (why not just ask it?)… or poverty (oh, you can’t afford to ask it; you want one of us to ask it)—an increasing problem as we less and less have something to offer in trade that it desires and lacks.
How about “idle musings” or “sense of wonder”, rather than “curiosity”? I remember a time before I had instant access to google whenever I had a question. Back then, a thought of “I wonder why X” was not immediately followed by googling “why X”, but sometimes instead followed by thinking about X (incl. via “shower thoughts”), daydreaming about X, looking up X in a book, etc. It’s not exactly bad that we have search engines and LLMs nowadays, but for me it does feel like something was lost, too.
Exactly. But then what does “curiosity” signal? Not laziness (as suggested in the post), but the opposite, right? Just asking seems the lazier version.
Compare to asking your colleague something that could be found by 10 seconds of googling. These days, you are supposed to google first. In ten years, you will be supposed to ask an AI for the explanation first, which for many people will also be the last step; and for the more curious ones the expected second and third steps will be something like “try a different prompt”, “ask additional questions”, “switch to a different AI”, etc.
A prereminiscence: It’s like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.
It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. Soon after it was doing it pretty well and you watched it with admiration as if it were a dog balancing on a ball. Then soon it could do it well enough for most purposes, you couldn’t help but admit. Then as good as all but the best, even to those who could tell the difference. And then we were suddenly all wet, gathering our remaining picnic and heading for higher ground, not only completely outclassed but even unable to judge by how far we were being outclassed. Once a chess machine can beat everybody every time, who is left to applaud when it gets twice again as good?
If it had been a war, we would have had a little ceremony as we brought down our flag and folded it up and put it away, but because it happened as quickly and quietly as it did and because we weren’t sure whether we wanted to admit it was happening, there was no formal hand-off. One day we just resignedly realized we could no longer matter much, but there was so much more now to appreciate and we could see echoes and reflections of ourselves in it, so we didn’t put up a fight.
Every once in a while someone would write an essay, Joan Didion quality, really good. Or write a song. Poignant, beautiful, original even. Not maybe the best essay or the best song we’d seen that day, but certainly worthy of being in the top ranks. And we’d think: we’ve still got it. We can still rally when we’ve got our backs to the wall. Don’t count us out yet. But it was just so hard, and there was so much else to do. And so when it happened less and less frequently, we weren’t surprised.
And our curiosity left us, too. We half-remembered a time when we would have satisfied curiosity by research and experiment (words that increasingly had the flavor of “thaumaturgy,” denoting processes productive though by unclear means). But nowadays curiosity is déclassé. It suggests laziness (why not just ask it?)… or poverty (oh, you can’t afford to ask it; you want one of us to ask it)—an increasing problem as we less and less have something to offer in trade that it desires and lacks.
“But nowadays curiosity was déclassé. It suggested laziness (why not just ask it?)…”
I think that does not work. Asking is easy, so asking is the lazy option.
How about “idle musings” or “sense of wonder”, rather than “curiosity”? I remember a time before I had instant access to google whenever I had a question. Back then, a thought of “I wonder why X” was not immediately followed by googling “why X”, but sometimes instead followed by thinking about X (incl. via “shower thoughts”), daydreaming about X, looking up X in a book, etc. It’s not exactly bad that we have search engines and LLMs nowadays, but for me it does feel like something was lost, too.
Exactly. But then what does “curiosity” signal? Not laziness (as suggested in the post), but the opposite, right? Just asking seems the lazier version.
Compare to asking your colleague something that could be found by 10 seconds of googling. These days, you are supposed to google first. In ten years, you will be supposed to ask an AI for the explanation first, which for many people will also be the last step; and for the more curious ones the expected second and third steps will be something like “try a different prompt”, “ask additional questions”, “switch to a different AI”, etc.