The Knowledge Trap

Ignoring the multitudes that are giddy with joy as they discover the thrill of interacting with all the GPTs and getting intelligent and coherent responses, there are the handfuls of us who are lamenting how AI is going to whip our asses (and the rest of the bodies connected to those asses).

Most of the lamenting people however are outraged by my proposition that books were a form of AI. A primitive, but essential step towards GenAI.

This is how I see the progression.

Early human kind communicated all ideas in spoken form. We listened to stories. Unlike all the hype you see in the “enlightened” world about stories and story-telling, my focus in that line above is not on stories. it’s on “listened”. We *listened* to stories. That’s how we learned everything.

Then came writing. Carving on stone tablets. and cave walls. Both language as well as the materials to record them on were “primitive” at first, but continually refined till we had languages of all kinds. and paper (papyrus?) to capture our ramblings and our edicts.

And then, books.

Billions and billions of books printed on paper. Paper that used to be trees. And forests. Trees and wood horribly dissolved and transmuted using corrosive chemicals into paper. But I digress.

Now people could read dozens of books. Ingest knowledge in hitherto incalculable amounts. Build on that knowledge. Write more books. Ad infinitum.

Then came the digital world. Computers. Word processors. We arguably saved a few trees and started creating electronic books.

Then the internet. Now we were able to share these books.

Then search engines. databases. we didn’t have to read the whole book anymore. they were all indexed and we could look for a few keywords and get close to what we were looking for.

Finally(?) AI. machine learning. “deep” learning. neural networks. Gradient descent (into hell). But remember, if there hadn’t been books (and then blogs and articles and research papers and all of that), genAI would have nothing.

In conclusion, genAI would like to thank its ancestor: books.

I think what has driven this whole caravan is the human desire to get answers. Get them sooner. Get better answers. And practically all the people who have created AI are people who passionately hate people (including themselves, but that’s a different story altogether. Or is it?) The very idea of sitting down with, and talking to people is ridiculous to them.

Enter genAI. Exit humanity.