Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains.  These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions.  Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see. 

Today’s topic unlocks humanity’s superpower; The ability to critically think, ask questions, and form, unform, and reform ideas. It’s a key aspect that AI currently can’t do and one that underpins Polymathic thinking and feeds into learning, unlearning, and relearning. Once we understand this ability, we can properly contextualize AI into the useful, but limited assistant that it is.

Introduction

AI computes, humans think.  When humans think, they ask questions because they are curious.  AI only works with what they have and asks for no more.

This is an important distinction that often goes overlooked. If you ask ChatGPT a question, it will respond and churn out an answer. To get it to ask for more information, you have to tell it to ask for more information which then becomes a separate sequence of activities. It’s not actually asking you for more information but more of a ‘call and response.’ It’s not curious and it’s never confused.

As

discusses in the essay Hallucination Nation – Part I – what we anthropomorphize as ‘hallucinations’ are actually errors. Humans hallucinate and AI has errors in computation. While this might seem trivial at first, it highlights yet another way in which How we think about AI can actually manifest our interpretation of AI.

Now that may feel a little philosophical but it’s important because when we talked about the trifecta of Critical Thinking previously, we discovered there are three things to the concept:

1. Knowledge Management

2. Logical Structuring

3. Application of Critique

Number 3 is related to Critical and the first two are related to Thinking. Humans do all three when they think critically and, right now, AI can only do #2.

AI is fed structured knowledge and then computes a logical response in the form of predictive text or image completion, but it really doesn’t have a way to critique it. I’ll also add that even #2 is limited because it can’t form, unform, and reform logic to play with the ideas. If you ask the exact same question again, it will often give you a totally different answer.

Some might contest that Microsoft Bing with ChatGPT can search for information it has not yet been fed, but it does so under very structured methods similar to Bing Search without ChatGPT and how Google does it. However, now it will work to summarize a series of results for the user.

Humans think and AIs compute.

In application

Once we understand the capabilities and limitations of AI and, I hope by now, we realize that anthropomorphizing is something we really should avoid, we can then better see how to best put AI to use in a way that really helps us move humanity forward.

To start with, as

captures in the essay On-Boarding your AI in