We are not always great at learning from each other, together with each other, from history, or from other documented bodies of knowledge. We too often subject too poor models too soon to reality. An important reason is that we seem to have an aversion to inquiry.
Philosophy
The Buddha equation
There is some deep wisdom popping out from Jensen’s inequality.
What is true?
Truth is instrumental to the survival of democracy and indeed the survival of our very species. In this post I try to define what truth is.
Knowledge as a model of the world
Given that the main use of knowledge is to navigate through the world and through life, we can say that ontologically knowledge is our model of the world.
A humanistic world through a mechanistic world-view
A mechanical world-view without belief in free will leads to a more humanistic world.
It takes a human to find the dragons
Without intrinsic motivation, the ability to hypothesize beyond training, or the capacity for real-world experimentation, AI will remain a tool that processes human-created information rather than a creator of new knowledge.
Does an AI produce knowledge?
The LLM can interpolate within the knowledge space it’s been trained on, filling in gaps by blending concepts in novel ways. However, it will stay within the convex hull of its training data, constrained by the boundaries of what it has learned.
Can an AI take responsibility?
A mantra repeated several times at a healthcare conference that I attended recently, is that only humans, not AI, can take responsibility for something. This made me think more deeply about what it really means to take responsibility and what, if anything, sets humans and AIs apart in this respect.