On Giving Up Understanding
AI has made me question many of my prior assumptions and concepts - what intelligence is, how it can be achieved, its relationship to language. Hence, I was also tempted to question and revisit my relationship to understanding. You see, my current (and prior) perspective on understanding puts it as one of the most important, high-value activities undertaken by humans. It is through understanding that learning can happen. And it is through learning that transformation can happen. This is how we improve - it allows for explicit runtime code modification that produces (more of, better of) a desired outcome! It underpins both creative and analytical tasks. It is, to me, a core part of being human.
But it seems like computers are able to arrive at similar conclusions to those of a person wielding their expertise at a similar task. Which is remarkably cool! Putting aside how grandiose current progress slope looks like, a more pragmatic question is - should we defer understanding to machines?
My answer is a distinctive no.
The same way we should not trade nor give up a real and healthy social life for one that's digital and intermediated by big corps with a different incentive structure, the same level of carefulness should apply to our cognition.
Personal - I don't want to relinquish and give up on something that is intrinsic human, and makes up a significant portion of the joy I get out of working.
Intellectual - Outsourcing the key learning mechanism to a machine would make my brain atrophy (at a faster rate), as I would naturally stop learning12.
Moral - I would not be able to honestly produce any assertions or establish any level of responsibility over my work3, because the machine owns the understanding.
If they sound a bit preposterous or far-fetched, you are also probably right. The conclusion came out of me trying to project far out - >5y horizon, which forces me to assume some model of progress, and this was done over a worst case scenario.
Similarly, how does a good diet look like? Fundamentally, it should be additive to the human being. It should make you better - your brain, your relationships, your work, your outputs.