learning as rebellion

Is human learning now an act of rebellion?

Since 2017 I have made this observation — For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

What kind of brute force is the current AI (GPT + LLM) that drives the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc.? Dave Snowden provides some insight in Reclaiming Human Sense-Making in an Age of AI Worship.

So, humans don’t make decisions in the same way as LLM’s work. And doing autism faster doesn’t make you intelligent. And LLM in human terms is deeply autistic … And if I want to put it really simply, we’re not reliant on training data sets to deal with a problem. Things like metaphor, things like abstraction, things like fiction, human beings have developed all sorts of ways we can handle complete novelty without having to replicate what we know from the past … AI is inductive, humans are abductive. In logic terms, human beings evolve to actually make unexpected, unconnected links between things which are apparently unconnected. Abduction is called the logic of hunches. If you go back to the pragmatists we’re really very good at that, whereas AI is always inductive in nature because it’s using past incidences to make statements about the future.

The use of these tools on a large scale does not sound like a huge leap in collective human learning but rather a path that will impede creativity and innovation. Tristan Harris commented on The Dangers of Unregulated AI on Humanity & the Workforce with an ominous conclusion.

Just to sum it up, we are building the most powerful, inscrutable, uncontrollable technology that we have ever invented that’s already demonstrating the rogue behaviors that we thought only existed in bad sci-fi movies.

We’re releasing it faster than we’ve deployed any other technology in history and under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety.

There’s a word for this that I want everyone to just know, which is this is insane.

So, is human learning now an act of rebellion? If so, it’s a rebellion I want be part of.