ChatGPT Is Changing Our Understanding of the Human Intellect

[Music] I remember when I first saw chat BT output writing that line of letters being banged out left to right on my computer screen it was like so exciting

but it also made me really afraid it was incredible that computers could now talk back to me but I also felt a lot of dread I'm a writer what was going to

happen to me I think we've all had this experience with AI over the last year and a half it's been an emotional roller coaster it kind of threatens our conception of ourselves

we've long defined the difference between humans and animals as being about the intellect this started 2,000 years ago with Aristotle who wrote the life of the intellect is the best and

the pleasantest for man for the intellect more than anything else is man therefore a life Guided by the intellect is best 2,000 years later the playwright

and short story writer Anton COV agreed in his Nolla W number 6 where he wrote the intellect draws a sharp line between animals and man and suggests the divinity of the ladder I think this has

all gotten more and more Salient as we've moved from an economy driven by industrial labor to knowledge work if you're reading this you probably put a

lot of stock in what you know and its ability to let you do your job after all that's what knowledge work is all about and if we Define ourselves and our value

by what we know it's no wonder that language models seem scary if AI can write and worse think what's left that makes us unique I think llms are going

to change how we think about knowledge work and in doing so I think they're going to change how we think about the characteristics that make us uniquely human and how we think about ourselves

but these days I'm not actually scared I'm actually more excited and curious and filled with wonder my sense of self has changed and I think that's a good

thing chachu BT has caused me to see my intellect and its role in the creative process differently than I did before Chach PT doesn't replace me it just changes what it is that I do I think

it's possible for you to experience this level of excitement by understanding a little bit better what language models do and how they work and then expanding your view of yourself and what you're

capable of let's talk about what that looks like to start let's talk about what the intellect actually is for the purposes of this article the intellect is that thing that humans uniquely have

that animals don't this is a fuzzy definition by design it reflects what feels threatening about AI that which makes us uniquely human in reality the intellect is this gigantic combination

of different brain processes that are lumped under a single heading that's why it's easier for us to Define it via negativa by what it's not than what it is that's why we Define it by whatever

it is that we do that animals don't do our fuzzy definition of the intellect is why our first encounters with Chachi BT are so threatening they touch a sort of lightning rod inside of us for a

millennia we've defined ourselves and our our sense of self by this amorphous set of processes that we've lumped under this heading the intellect and suddenly there's something encroaching on our

turf because it can do some of the things that we associate with the intellect we feel both excited because we're no longer alone and afraid because

it threatens to replace us it threatens to replace that thing that we feel as uniquely human in order to regain our sense of self we need to create a new sense of separation between the things that we Define as making us uniquely

human and what AI can do we need to redefine intellect to make it work in an AI driven World fortunately we've done this before and Technology can help

psychology is full of these fuzzy Concepts like the intellect that don't have clear boundaries and don't have clear separation between them for example take schizophrenia and bipolar

disorder until as late as the 1960s we thought of them as being Related Disorders that were caused by a similar underlying thing but technology actually helped us pull them apart specifically

the drug lithium lithium can treat bipolar disorder but it doesn't treat schizophrenia and if we understand that I think we'll understand a little bit more about how Chachi BT can help us

redefine and tease apart our sense of the intellect so let's talk about that story it all starts with guinea pigs in the late 1940s a doctor named JF Cade

who apparently had way too much time on his hands discovered that the urine of manic patients was toxic to guinea pigs

Cade set out to find out why as one does he discovered that manic patients had elevated levels of uric acid in their urine and he thought that the uric acid

might be the thing that was causing the toxicity to the guinea pigs so he decided to perform a controlled experiment he would inject the guinea pigs with varying levels of uric acid

and see if it had any effect on them to do the experiment he dissolved the uric acid into a lithium carbonate solution and the lithium carbonate was the thing that would keep the uric acid as a liquid so he could inject it and when he

ended up injecting the lithium carbonate solution into the guinea pigs he noticed that they became remarkably calm they would just sort of sit there like chilled out in their cages which is

something that he did not anticipate and in a move that revolutionized the field of psychology he decided to take the thing that was making his guinea pigs chilled out and

inject it into the manic patients that he was treating the results were amazing the lithium resolved their mania this is a sort of remarkable series of events for a couple reasons one is that he

discovered a drug that has helped hundreds of thousands of people over the last century and has saved countless lives but the other thing that's really interesting about lithium is that it helped us perform what the psychiatrist

Peter Kramer calls a pharmacological dissection it helped us pull apart two things that we previously thought were overlapping it differentiated manic depression from every other kind of mental illness because lithium only

treats manic depression it doesn't treat schizophrenia and before lithium had come about we thought that all those things were sort of similar and were caused by the same underlying cause which is psychological conflicts that

came from early childhood but lithium which had the ability to cure manic depression or bipolar disorder and only that it took this fuzzy category of mental illness and it carved it out of

that category as its own separate thing with a biological cause in other words lithium was a lever that became a new lens on how we see our minds and the

world and I think we can use this model to do a similar technological dissection of our intellect once we understand what chatu PT is and what it does we can use

it to redefine and clarify our previously fuzzy concept of the intellect in a way that keeps our sense of self intact okay so let's talk about chpt let's talk about what it is and

what it does technically chaty PT does next token PR given a starting set of words it's very good at predicting the next couple words in the sequence in practice what that

means is that language models are really good at reformatting and reconstituting old knowledge in new and useful ways the cognitive scientist Allison gnik refers

to chat gbt and language models as technologies that enhance cultural transmission to her they are powerful and efficient imitation engines gnik thinks that language models are

extensions of previous technology revolutions that we're already familiar with things like the written word the printing press the internet they allow existing information to be passed efficiently from one group of people to

another they increase our ability to coordinate with each other as humans and to her this means that they are engines for cultural Evolution and cultural production and to put a finer point on it it means that language models aren't

very good so far at discovering new things what they are incredible at is taking the sum total of human knowledge of existing knowledge and bringing it to bear in any given situation in exactly

the right format for it to be consumed and its powers for doing that for its ability to transmit things that we already know into the right context are far greater than any proceeding

Innovation from the printing press to the internet to say it really plainly chat PT is a great summarizer and that might seem pejorative but it's actually not it's really powerful and important

for it to be a summarizer the sum total of human knowledge currently outstrips any of our abilities to actually use it so we actually are going to need language models and in order to make use of what Humanity collectively knows

about now that we're thinking about chatab BT as primarily a summarizer we can go back to that word intellect see if we can use summarizing as a way to refine and change our sense of what

intellect means how we see ourselves here's what happened when I started to see chat chbt as a summarizer first I started to see that summaries are happening everywhere the emails that I write are primarily summaries of

meetings that I've had the articles that I write are mostly summaries of books that I've been reading the code that I write is often summaries of what I find on stack Overflow even much of this

video essay is a summary all the stuff about JF Cade and lithium is me summarizing stuff I read in Peter Kramer's book listening to proac at this point realizing how much I summarize

it's easy for me to freak out again if summaries are everywhere in my work in life what role do I have left if chbt can do them for me and the answer to me is really obvious there are so many

things that I do in a day or that go into my creative work that are not summaries and so it's sort of fantastic that I have a tool that can do them for me because now I can focus on other things when I really sit down to think

about the interesting thing or the hard thing about this video essay the summarizing of information is only actually sort of a small part and it's not even the most interesting thing the interesting most key elements are things

like my life experiences or my emotional experiences working with Chachi BT or the studio and the people that are helping me produce this summarizing skills are are actually sort of a

creative drudgery I learned to do them well because I had to in order to get my work done but they don't actually have to be core to me if I don't want them to be once I start thinking in this way I

actually start to subtract summarizing as a skill that is part of my intellect it's no longer core to my sense of identity or my sense of self it feels

much more okay to let chat PT do the summaries for me because now I get to be the person that directs the summaries that decides whether the summaries are good or not I become sort of the editor or the

manager of all the summarizing that's going on and I can also summarize way more things in a day and be much more efficient because I have chat GPT to do it for me all this is to say that my

sense of self heals pretty quickly once I subtract summarizing from it what I realize is that much richness remains in fact this whole process highlights a lot of the richness that I might not have

seen otherwise it highlights a lot of the things that I can do that I value that I might not have seen otherwise and in this way chat GPT is sort of a lever that becomes a new lens on myself and on

the world it helps me think about myself differently and my role in the create a process differently than I did previously and a key point of all this is that it doesn't specifically have to be about summarizing if chat BT had been

good at something else like discovering new ideas I think I would be sitting here in front of this camera extoling the virtues of summarizing and talking about how finding new ideas is is sort

of easy um just as humans we tend to Define ourselves by what we do differently from other things and that sense is adaptable it's flexible it's changeable we are flexible adaptable

beings and I think that's a good thing I think that that sense of that sense of adaptability is part of what makes humans unique and I want to note that it's it's an important thing that many

jobs are primarily about summarizing today and that those jobs might change dramatically or may not exist in a world where chbt can do incredible summaries and that's important and I think we need

to like face that head on as a society to decide what to do with with people whose skills are primarily about summarizing so that we can take care of them and find new roles from them in the economy but that has nothing to do with

our underlying sense of self or our underlying sense of what makes humans unique in the universe all of that including the intellect can be left intact but maybe slightly changed in a world with language models and this has

happened before in his book the weirdest people in the world Joseph Henrik tells the story about the English brick layer and convict William Buckley who was sent

to an Australian penal colony in 1803 Buckley and a few of his friends ended up escaping from The Colony into the Australian Wilderness Buckley got separated from his friends his friends died they couldn't survive in that

environment but Buckley was saved because he was adopted by an Aboriginal tribe Henrik tells the story because it teaches us something about how human beings change in response to their culture and the technology they're

surrounded by Henrik and his friends were not able to survive in the wilderness to desite being pretty much genetically identical to the Aboriginal tribe that was able to survive in that

environment why buckle and his friends came from a modern culture and they they'd learned a set of beliefs norms and ideas that allowed them to survive in that environment when they were

thrust into a completely different environment they were totally unequipped for it and couldn't make it from the outside they might have looked quite similar to the aboriginals who were able to survive but there was one distinct difference the aboriginals had a set of

cultural technologies that allowed them to thrive Henrik argues that humans have evolved brains that allow us to most effectively learn the ideas beliefs values motivations and practices that

will need to survive and thrive in whatever ecological niche that we find ourselves a part of the way this happens is through culture it's a dramatic accelerant on our ability to solve problems and Thrive but Henrik writes

these genetically evolved learning abilities aren't simply downloading a cultural software package into our innate neurological Hardware instead culture rewires our brains and Alters

our biology it actually renovates the firmware in essence our species our psychology our brains our bodies Our biology it's all shaped by culture and culture is to a large extent shaped by

technology who we are is shaped by the technology that we are surrounded by Chachi BT is the latest and a long line of cultural and technological advances that have changed what it means to be

human we don't need to wait for brain computer interfaces for AI to hook into our biology it's already doing that can we use it to increase the amount of richness and Beauty in the world instead

of the amount of scarcity and ugliness I think we can let's do it together oh my gosh folks you absolutely positively have to smash that like

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