It was a mixed year that is now coming to an end. Mankind has had to train its crisis muscle vigorously against a whole series of storms. The pandemic, the Ukraine war, and the energy and economic crises have called into question many things that we had taken for granted in the course of progress. And yet: in the history of mankind we have learned to deal with it and to find solutions. Nothing that happened in 2022 was entirely new.
So it may come as a surprise when I claim that the year 2022 still has something in store for us in its final days that feels different. Not at all crisis-like, more like the extension of the human being into the computer. Not destructive, but more like a cornucopia of creativity that can be spilled over almost any daily errand. And yet it could produce a different kind of crisis than the one we have experienced again this year.
Just a few weeks ago, artificial intelligence had its very own iPhone moment. Just as the iPhone gave people around the world everyday mobile access to the internet, people in large numbers have now started using AI for text and image production. Because it is so simple and so impressive in result what this AI, like ChatGPT, Dall-Evon OpenAI – called generative AI – can produce.
It’s no longer just the nerds and the experts who use them. It is everyone and everyone. And that makes an existential difference for humanity. While the tool is currently free to use, the OpenAI founders expect $1 billion in revenue by 2024.
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With systems like Dall-E or ChatGPT, the revolution in generative AI has only just begun. A few years and a few hundred million dollars later, we will see it take our civilization by storm. Because it’s so easy to use, the results are amazing, and human creativity is a feat that takes decades of learning and practice.
Miriam Meckel is a German journalist and entrepreneur. She is co-founder and CEO of ada Learning GmbH. She also teaches as a professor for communication management at the University of St. Gallen.
(Photo: Klawe Rzeczy)
To express oneself, to communicate in words and pictures, is the essential form of human existence and at the same time the greatest effort that a human being can make over and over again over the course of a lifetime. Why so much work if there is another way? When you can have speech and images produced at the push of a button?
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Because reading and writing are cultural techniques that are prerequisites for many other human techniques and skills. Not only through the regular PISA studies do we know how important reading and writing skills are. Only those who have mastered the language as an active and passive instrument can find their way around the world independently.
When we read and write, we lay out a trace of reality within ourselves that ideally enables us to go through our own lives and the world as enlightened individuals. It does make a difference whether you read or write on paper or on the computer: first of all, understanding something means touching it. Only in the second, abstract sense does it mean understanding its meaning.
There is an entire line of research in cultural studies that insists that handwriting draws this track of learning in one’s own brain more sustainably than any typing on the computer. In fact, it is true that in writing, the linear order of the letters presupposes an idea of the internal and historical order of the things one is trying to describe. But even those who dismiss such positions as culture-pessimistic mumbo-jumbo should think twice about ChatGPT.
Miriam Meckel: The traditional essay in school and university is dead
OpenAI’s chatbot heralds the next generation of internet search. With the help of a descriptive input (in English “prompt”) one receives a formulated text, a greeting, an essay, a poem or the outline of a book.
If millions of people are now communicating like crazy with ChatGPT, it is because it is so incredibly practical and the result is actually impressively good. ChatGPT thus becomes a personal tutor, a learning helper for everyone. The bot can find and reassemble information at a speed that humans will never match with their brains.
The traditional essay in school and university is dead. The type of essay that is based on boring, stereotypical questions from teachers who don’t want to exert themselves. ChatGPT reacts just as allergic to such behavior as humans: The bot produces generic, meaningless texts.
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In the future, the art of dealing with generative AI systems will lie more in asking relevant, detailed questions than in knowing good answers yourself. This could be an opportunity, because the right questions are the beginning of all knowledge.
We have to reinvent education
But if we can outsource learning to AI, why bother torturing ourselves? Studies have shown that people don’t bother storing information in their minds when they know they can look anything up on the internet. Those who are not allowed or cannot do this are much better at remembering independently.
In view of this, a few veils of systemic dumbing down by clever AI are on the horizon. If we don’t want to get stuck in an endless loop of a constantly new remix of historical data by chatbots, we have to reinvent education. This includes understanding how such generative AI systems work. From now on, this belongs in every school and university curriculum. We also have to learn to learn anew and to understand human and artificial intelligence as partners.
This is nothing less than a new enlightenment. Immanuel Kant described this in 1784 with “sapere aude”: “Have the courage to use your own understanding.” At that time it was about the power of the individual to understand and change the world through free and autonomous thinking. Today it’s about an entire species – the human mind, which can only be sharpened by humans themselves. What AI then does with it is a new chapter. The prospects are pretty stormy right now.
In this column, Miriam Meckel writes fortnightly about ideas, innovations and interpretations that make progress and a better life possible. Because what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly. ada-magazin.com
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