04/12/2023
Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence with Ana Ilievska
Ana is a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and a Lecturer of French and Italian at Stanford. Her teaching and research focus on the relationship between literature, the industrial revolution, and technology from a Southern perspective.
| 00:00:00.000 |
I hope you will forgive me, Professor Harrison,
|
| 00:00:02.800 |
and not take it as too much of a violation
|
| 00:00:04.880 |
to put some words into your voice.
|
| 00:00:07.240 |
Changes in artificial intelligence come quickly,
|
| 00:00:10.360 |
and what I had done with a generic voice a few weeks ago
|
| 00:00:13.640 |
can now be done with any voice you wish to wield.
|
| 00:00:16.840 |
This technology has been with us for some years already,
|
| 00:00:19.640 |
but now requires only 60 seconds of a person's voice
|
| 00:00:22.760 |
to replicate it to this.
|
| 00:00:24.440 |
Yeah, it really does sound like me.
|
| 00:00:26.520 |
[MUSIC PLAYING]
|
| 00:00:30.280 |
This is Casey S.U. Stanford.
|
| 00:00:33.280 |
Welcome to entitled opinions.
|
| 00:00:34.840 |
My name is Robert Harrison.
|
| 00:00:36.600 |
We're coming to you from the Stanford canvas.
|
| 00:00:38.840 |
[MUSIC PLAYING]
|
| 00:00:41.840 |
When I hear that synthetic replication of my voice,
|
| 00:00:55.840 |
I get a better sense of how the Greeks envisioned
|
| 00:00:58.240 |
the afterlife, a shadow world where the full-bodied person
|
| 00:01:02.560 |
is reduced to his or her idol on, or disembodied image.
|
| 00:01:07.960 |
In the old days, the shades and Hades
|
| 00:01:10.200 |
required the blood of a black ram to animate their voices.
|
| 00:01:14.880 |
These days, it only requires co.
|
| 00:01:18.080 |
Hold tight, everyone.
|
| 00:01:19.440 |
A synthetic Hades coming our way.
|
| 00:01:21.520 |
[MUSIC PLAYING]
|
| 00:01:24.520 |
[MUSIC PLAYING]
|
| 00:01:29.520 |
I'm joined in the studio today by Anna Iyevska,
|
| 00:01:40.120 |
a brilliant young scholar who thinks and writes about technology
|
| 00:01:43.680 |
and the humanities.
|
| 00:01:45.640 |
She listened to our most recent show with Brian Chong
|
| 00:01:48.640 |
on artificial intelligence and large language models.
|
| 00:01:53.080 |
And she suggested that we do a follow-up show
|
| 00:01:55.280 |
on the same topic from other points of view.
|
| 00:01:58.120 |
And that's what's on tap for today.
|
| 00:02:00.960 |
But before we get started, let me repeat the hide-a-girt quote,
|
| 00:02:04.640 |
"I invoked in the intro to that show.
|
| 00:02:07.920 |
It's well known to the entitled opinions for gait.
|
| 00:02:12.640 |
The most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age
|
| 00:02:15.960 |
is that we are still not thinking.
|
| 00:02:20.360 |
I'm not sure anyone can tell us exactly what it means
|
| 00:02:23.040 |
to think thoughtfully, maybe not even hide-a-girt.
|
| 00:02:27.120 |
But for what it's worth, here's what DH Lawrence
|
| 00:02:30.520 |
declares in his poem, "Thought."
|
| 00:02:34.920 |
"Thought is a man in his wholeness, holy attending.
|
| 00:02:40.320 |
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness."
|
| 00:02:46.560 |
The source of that welling up remains mysterious.
|
| 00:02:49.440 |
You could call it the collective unconscious
|
| 00:02:51.640 |
if you favor that term, or you could call it the underworld of the dead,
|
| 00:02:56.320 |
which is how I prefer to think of it.
|
| 00:02:59.120 |
Either way, within each of us, is a dark continent of the soul
|
| 00:03:03.720 |
where voices echo down to us from the past.
|
| 00:03:08.600 |
It requires a special kind of quietude
|
| 00:03:11.480 |
and a special kind of listening to hear them.
|
| 00:03:14.960 |
Those voices come to us mostly from books
|
| 00:03:18.120 |
and in a world drowning ever deeper in noise,
|
| 00:03:21.280 |
concentrated attention becomes more and more rare.
|
| 00:03:26.360 |
The poet Wallace Stevens reminds us of what the solitary activity
|
| 00:03:30.720 |
of thoughtful reading used to be like, at least for some of us.
|
| 00:03:37.440 |
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
|
| 00:03:41.200 |
The reader became the book and summer night
|
| 00:03:44.200 |
was like the conscious being of the book.
|
| 00:03:48.800 |
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
|
| 00:03:51.720 |
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
|
| 00:03:55.200 |
except that the reader leaned above the page,
|
| 00:03:58.520 |
wanted to lean, wanted much most to be the scholar
|
| 00:04:02.480 |
to whom his book is true, to whom the summer night
|
| 00:04:07.080 |
is like a perfection of thought.
|
| 00:04:10.360 |
The house was quiet because it had to be.
|
| 00:04:13.680 |
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,
|
| 00:04:17.720 |
the access of perfection to the page.
|
| 00:04:21.640 |
And the world was calm.
|
| 00:04:23.840 |
The truth in a calm world in which there is no other meaning,
|
| 00:04:28.800 |
itself is calm.
|
| 00:04:30.800 |
Its self is summer and night.
|
| 00:04:33.840 |
Its self is the reader leaning late and reading there.
|
| 00:04:41.920 |
Those who today still engage in deep reading are leaning late.
|
| 00:04:46.360 |
For historically, the hour is late indeed,
|
| 00:04:49.480 |
even if the world is far from calm.
|
| 00:04:54.680 |
My guest today, Anatyayyevska, is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow
|
| 00:04:59.040 |
at the Stanford Humanities Center
|
| 00:05:01.200 |
and lecturer in our Department of French and Italian.
|
| 00:05:05.120 |
A comparator to works in Italian, Luza phone and Balkan studies.
|
| 00:05:09.200 |
She holds a PhD in comparative literature
|
| 00:05:11.720 |
from the University of Chicago.
|
| 00:05:14.680 |
She's currently working on a book called Deep Tech,
|
| 00:05:17.760 |
Literature, Southern Thought, and the Question
|
| 00:05:20.120 |
Concerning Technology.
|
| 00:05:22.760 |
She has published on Italian, Portuguese, and Luza
|
| 00:05:25.400 |
African writers, in addition to numerous translations
|
| 00:05:28.920 |
and public scholarship on poetry, sound,
|
| 00:05:31.920 |
and the ethos of Silicon Valley.
|
| 00:05:34.080 |
And welcome to entitled opinions.
|
| 00:05:37.000 |
Bonjour, no, Robert.
|
| 00:05:38.040 |
Thank you so much for the invitation.
|
| 00:05:40.760 |
So since you arrived at Stanford about--
|
| 00:05:43.160 |
well, almost two years ago, you and I
|
| 00:05:45.000 |
have had some conversations about thought, solitude,
|
| 00:05:48.880 |
and modern technology, and more recently
|
| 00:05:51.600 |
about artificial intelligence, we both agree
|
| 00:05:56.920 |
that thought requires something like solitude,
|
| 00:06:00.760 |
since solitude allows for being in dialogue with oneself,
|
| 00:06:05.480 |
as well as with the voices that reach us from beyond the threshold.
|
| 00:06:10.600 |
I, for one, believe that most of the essential things
|
| 00:06:13.200 |
that come to fruition later in life
|
| 00:06:15.080 |
are nourished in the hours that a young person spends
|
| 00:06:18.200 |
alone reading, learning, wondering, observing,
|
| 00:06:23.880 |
dreaming, imagining, and pondering.
|
| 00:06:26.840 |
We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence
|
| 00:06:28.960 |
today.
|
| 00:06:29.440 |
So let me ask you to start with, do you
|
| 00:06:32.320 |
think that artificial intelligence, if it one day realizes
|
| 00:06:35.360 |
its full potential, and help to promote this sort of thoughtful
|
| 00:06:39.120 |
solitude, or will it drown it out like most other technologies
|
| 00:06:43.920 |
do today?
|
| 00:06:45.640 |
Thank you, Robert.
|
| 00:06:46.560 |
Well, this is a fine question, but one
|
| 00:06:49.200 |
that I think we have to approach carefully.
|
| 00:06:51.720 |
I suggest we do this in three steps.
|
| 00:06:54.480 |
First, let's think a bit deeper, perhaps,
|
| 00:06:56.680 |
about the nature and location of thinking.
|
| 00:06:59.400 |
Then we can talk about solitude, where does solitude really
|
| 00:07:02.120 |
take place?
|
| 00:07:03.400 |
And then finally, we can ask whether AI
|
| 00:07:05.560 |
can promote what you call thoughtful solitude.
|
| 00:07:08.080 |
I really like that phrase, by the way.
|
| 00:07:10.280 |
So to start with a definition of thinking
|
| 00:07:12.280 |
that perhaps would be widely accepted,
|
| 00:07:15.160 |
and I think our neuroscientist friends would agree too.
|
| 00:07:17.840 |
I define thinking as a cognitive ability, first of all,
|
| 00:07:20.360 |
specific to language use, that takes place within the embodied
|
| 00:07:24.280 |
mind.
|
| 00:07:24.720 |
It's very important that we emphasize the embodied mind
|
| 00:07:27.360 |
and not say the brain, because there's
|
| 00:07:29.560 |
a whole series of contributions, such as context
|
| 00:07:32.560 |
experience, family, nature, culture, genetics,
|
| 00:07:36.000 |
that contribute to how a person thinks.
|
| 00:07:38.880 |
So it's a cognitive ability.
|
| 00:07:40.640 |
The good news is that it's innate to all human beings.
|
| 00:07:44.360 |
And it is not to be confused with knowledge or information.
|
| 00:07:48.800 |
This means that, for instance, we can have knowledgeable
|
| 00:07:50.960 |
engineers, coders, scientists, doctors, journalists,
|
| 00:07:54.640 |
philosophers or business people, but they do not necessarily
|
| 00:07:57.600 |
think.
|
| 00:07:58.920 |
And the adverse we can have people who think
|
| 00:08:01.080 |
but are not necessarily knowledgeable.
|
| 00:08:02.840 |
So one thing doesn't guarantee the other.
|
| 00:08:05.600 |
So in a way, thinking, I see it as the fifth element
|
| 00:08:09.200 |
alongside writing, speaking, listening, and reading.
|
| 00:08:13.040 |
In this sense, it's a form of technique.
|
| 00:08:15.560 |
It's something that can be practiced and can be fostered.
|
| 00:08:18.880 |
And definitely, we cannot teach a person what to think.
|
| 00:08:21.800 |
But perhaps we can give them some direction
|
| 00:08:25.120 |
of how to go about the process of thinking.
|
| 00:08:28.440 |
So the most important thing about thinking
|
| 00:08:30.360 |
is that-- and we would agree here with Hannah Arden,
|
| 00:08:32.640 |
our favorite philosopher, that it's
|
| 00:08:34.760 |
an ongoing, robust internal dialogue
|
| 00:08:37.800 |
where decision-making, planning, and moral considerations
|
| 00:08:41.680 |
take place.
|
| 00:08:43.200 |
So this kind of internal dialogue requires
|
| 00:08:46.320 |
a split within the self.
|
| 00:08:49.080 |
So for Arndt-- and again, I'm going to quote her here,
|
| 00:08:52.360 |
she's speaking with Socrates and Plato--
|
| 00:08:54.880 |
she calls thinking a soundless dialogue between me
|
| 00:08:58.360 |
and myself, the two in one.
|
| 00:09:01.080 |
And then she writes, if you want to think,
|
| 00:09:02.920 |
you must see to it that the two who carry on the thinking
|
| 00:09:06.560 |
dialogue being good shape, that the partners be friends.
|
| 00:09:11.000 |
She constantly speaks about thinking
|
| 00:09:13.360 |
as meeting the other fellow who is within us.
|
| 00:09:17.200 |
So thinking is also very private.
|
| 00:09:19.280 |
It takes place in the embodied mind
|
| 00:09:21.520 |
and what we could call our mind as our hidden hermitage.
|
| 00:09:25.600 |
And I'm taking this term from Julian James,
|
| 00:09:27.200 |
of psychologists that now is coming into fashion
|
| 00:09:30.040 |
with generative AI.
|
| 00:09:32.120 |
So thinking takes place in a private mention
|
| 00:09:34.400 |
when we are free from the gaze of others,
|
| 00:09:37.040 |
but they're also free from ours.
|
| 00:09:39.720 |
The things we think about are usually absent.
|
| 00:09:42.720 |
They are not immediately available to our senses.
|
| 00:09:45.440 |
So in this sense, it requires a retreat
|
| 00:09:47.880 |
from the world, the type of thinking
|
| 00:09:50.480 |
that I'm speaking about.
|
| 00:09:52.080 |
Now, here are the problems that we face with thinking.
|
| 00:09:56.520 |
Logistical and psychological problems, right?
|
| 00:09:58.720 |
The question is, how can we live with ourselves?
|
| 00:10:01.800 |
Because in the absolute privacy of our minds,
|
| 00:10:04.240 |
we either encounter our best friend or our worst enemy.
|
| 00:10:07.880 |
So now the question is twofold
|
| 00:10:09.560 |
and in logistical and psychological terms.
|
| 00:10:12.600 |
Where can we find solitude,
|
| 00:10:14.440 |
logistically speaking in this world today?
|
| 00:10:16.640 |
And then once we found that solitude,
|
| 00:10:18.960 |
how can we bear it?
|
| 00:10:20.560 |
How can we bear to be solitary together with ourselves?
|
| 00:10:24.120 |
That is the question.
|
| 00:10:25.160 |
So thinking is psychological, it's difficult,
|
| 00:10:27.600 |
it's time-confusing, requires a retreat from the world,
|
| 00:10:31.080 |
discipline and practice,
|
| 00:10:32.720 |
and there is no visible marketable product, right?
|
| 00:10:35.720 |
It's not measurable.
|
| 00:10:37.160 |
So what do we do when we retreat to ourselves?
|
| 00:10:40.280 |
And how do we manage this dialogue?
|
| 00:10:43.440 |
Is the question?
|
| 00:10:44.360 |
Before we get to that question,
|
| 00:10:47.320 |
maybe we could trouble a little bit,
|
| 00:10:52.000 |
definition of thinking as something that takes place
|
| 00:10:54.400 |
within a mind,
|
| 00:10:56.800 |
an embodied mind to be sure,
|
| 00:10:58.320 |
but nevertheless, it sounds like one is retreating
|
| 00:11:02.120 |
into some kind of internal, psychological place.
|
| 00:11:07.120 |
Do you want to call it?
|
| 00:11:09.920 |
Certainly not an organ,
|
| 00:11:11.280 |
but some kind of inner region or domain
|
| 00:11:15.560 |
where this cognitive ability that you mentioned
|
| 00:11:20.080 |
gets activated.
|
| 00:11:24.000 |
But if one were to suggest, instead,
|
| 00:11:27.520 |
that thinking is not a cognitive ability,
|
| 00:11:30.520 |
that it doesn't generate from within itself,
|
| 00:11:35.160 |
a dialogue with itself,
|
| 00:11:37.520 |
but rather reaches us from outside of what we would normally
|
| 00:11:42.680 |
call the mind, it could reach us from nature.
|
| 00:11:46.600 |
I have mentioned on this show,
|
| 00:11:49.000 |
I think probably more than once,
|
| 00:11:50.480 |
that most nature does most of them, I thinking for me.
|
| 00:11:53.280 |
When I'm in the natural world,
|
| 00:11:55.360 |
I think very different thoughts than if I'm in my room
|
| 00:11:58.000 |
or in a classroom or something of that sort.
|
| 00:12:00.320 |
So could listening be the essence of a certain kind of thought
|
| 00:12:05.320 |
rather than cognitive ability?
|
| 00:12:08.440 |
Namely, an open, receptive, heedfulness
|
| 00:12:13.440 |
to what reaches us from depths
|
| 00:12:16.280 |
that don't belong to the cognitive mind,
|
| 00:12:20.200 |
but from some other kind of region of being.
|
| 00:12:23.560 |
- Yes, I wouldn't disagree with this definition
|
| 00:12:29.960 |
or with this problematization of the definition.
|
| 00:12:33.120 |
However, it's only partial, as I said,
|
| 00:12:35.040 |
what I mean by the embodied mind,
|
| 00:12:37.200 |
why do we think it means everything that we consider thinking
|
| 00:12:41.320 |
is a conglomeration of context, other people,
|
| 00:12:45.320 |
nature, our social environment, education,
|
| 00:12:47.800 |
culture, genetics, experience,
|
| 00:12:49.600 |
all these things contribute to thought.
|
| 00:12:51.360 |
And I think this is the main difference
|
| 00:12:53.120 |
between humans currently and machines
|
| 00:12:55.080 |
and why we think and they still do not,
|
| 00:12:57.680 |
is because machines lack that embodied engagement
|
| 00:13:00.920 |
with the world.
|
| 00:13:01.880 |
For them, it's almost impossible to engage with nature.
|
| 00:13:04.920 |
- Is that because the machine does not have a self?
|
| 00:13:07.960 |
- More importantly, it doesn't have a body.
|
| 00:13:11.440 |
I think this is the crucial difference.
|
| 00:13:14.480 |
It cannot experience the world through its own senses.
|
| 00:13:17.640 |
It's always told what to do.
|
| 00:13:19.680 |
- Okay, this is very important because we had a guest
|
| 00:13:23.480 |
on last spring, Marcus Gabriel, well known to you.
|
| 00:13:28.120 |
It was a fellow at the Humanities Center along with you.
|
| 00:13:30.720 |
And we did a show on the meaning of thought
|
| 00:13:33.040 |
where he proposed his thesis that thought is a six cents.
|
| 00:13:38.040 |
- Yes.
|
| 00:13:39.400 |
- And I gather that you sympathize with this notion
|
| 00:13:43.840 |
that thinking is embodied, it's a-
|
| 00:13:46.360 |
- Absolutely.
|
| 00:13:47.200 |
- It's a form of sense, if not perception, at least,
|
| 00:13:49.800 |
sensing.
|
| 00:13:52.400 |
And if we were speaking an Italian,
|
| 00:13:54.440 |
this would be beautiful because centiré in Italian,
|
| 00:13:58.360 |
which is for me the most wondrous word,
|
| 00:14:00.720 |
I know in any language, centiré means
|
| 00:14:03.240 |
at once to sense, to hear.
|
| 00:14:07.720 |
- Absolutely.
|
| 00:14:08.560 |
- And to feel, so all these things would mean
|
| 00:14:14.600 |
that thought is a kind of sensing in this broad.
|
| 00:14:19.600 |
- I understand.
|
| 00:14:22.320 |
Now, here is the most interesting problem for me
|
| 00:14:25.520 |
when it comes to thinking.
|
| 00:14:27.520 |
Thinking is at the same time,
|
| 00:14:29.840 |
perhaps the most subversive ability
|
| 00:14:32.080 |
that human beings have.
|
| 00:14:33.320 |
It's completely radical.
|
| 00:14:34.760 |
It's where ultimate skepticism and doubt happen,
|
| 00:14:37.520 |
as we know from the Cartesian lesson.
|
| 00:14:39.960 |
At the same time, it is the most susceptible sense
|
| 00:14:42.880 |
we have to manipulation and to ideology.
|
| 00:14:46.000 |
And why am I saying that?
|
| 00:14:47.040 |
You asked before that you suggested that we also think
|
| 00:14:50.280 |
with nature that so many of our thoughts
|
| 00:14:52.000 |
are suggested to us by the external world, right?
|
| 00:14:55.160 |
Well, this is very interesting,
|
| 00:14:56.400 |
and I would like here to introduce a thinker
|
| 00:14:58.480 |
that we already mentioned today in the show at the UNI,
|
| 00:15:00.920 |
talked about in our last conversation.
|
| 00:15:03.200 |
Julian James and his idea of the bicameral mind.
|
| 00:15:06.440 |
Well, his idea was that back in Homeric times,
|
| 00:15:09.760 |
at least in the Homeric epics that he studied very closely,
|
| 00:15:12.840 |
he says that his heroes had no internal mind space
|
| 00:15:17.080 |
to introspect upon.
|
| 00:15:18.800 |
They had what he called a so-called bicameral mind.
|
| 00:15:21.760 |
On the one hand, there was the self,
|
| 00:15:23.880 |
and then on the other hand, in the mind,
|
| 00:15:25.720 |
they were the gods.
|
| 00:15:27.080 |
So there was an executive branch within the brain,
|
| 00:15:29.680 |
which are the gods in the Odyssey and the Iliad,
|
| 00:15:32.560 |
and then there were the heroes who were the followers.
|
| 00:15:35.480 |
So for a very long time, Julian James posits,
|
| 00:15:38.760 |
human consciousness or human thinking
|
| 00:15:41.560 |
happened in this constellation where people heard voices
|
| 00:15:44.840 |
within their own head,
|
| 00:15:45.920 |
and they were convinced that those are the voices of the gods.
|
| 00:15:49.400 |
So today, in our time,
|
| 00:15:51.520 |
these, obviously, we don't hear these voices of the gods anymore.
|
| 00:15:54.520 |
So Julian James would say that in a sense,
|
| 00:15:56.200 |
we have become our own gods.
|
| 00:15:57.600 |
We have realized that the other voice in our head
|
| 00:15:59.600 |
is actually our own voice,
|
| 00:16:01.120 |
and we have learned how to dialogue with itself.
|
| 00:16:03.200 |
But today, what is the danger now of thinking
|
| 00:16:05.360 |
that thoughts come from an external instance,
|
| 00:16:07.520 |
or that that's the only way how we receive thoughts?
|
| 00:16:10.320 |
Well, then we can receive all sorts of messages.
|
| 00:16:12.960 |
We can be sent through social media, through TV,
|
| 00:16:15.840 |
through reading, through conversations with friends.
|
| 00:16:17.840 |
We can have all sorts of input that could feel like it's
|
| 00:16:20.920 |
another voice that is talking to ourselves.
|
| 00:16:23.160 |
Now, the question is, and I think this is partly,
|
| 00:16:25.720 |
or to grade degree, the task of the humanities
|
| 00:16:28.440 |
is to understand what voices should reach us.
|
| 00:16:32.800 |
There needs to be a certain kind of filter,
|
| 00:16:34.880 |
which is not in place anymore.
|
| 00:16:36.280 |
Yeah, that becomes very problematic,
|
| 00:16:38.520 |
because you're going to try to do a policing of the borders.
|
| 00:16:42.240 |
I agree with you.
|
| 00:16:44.000 |
Thinking is a very porous activity.
|
| 00:16:47.800 |
Things reach it.
|
| 00:16:49.360 |
Things determine it.
|
| 00:16:51.200 |
It also is not clear where exactly where it's taking place.
|
| 00:16:55.760 |
I mean, I'm not a big fan of Julian James.
|
| 00:16:58.520 |
I've tried to get into that book.
|
| 00:17:01.280 |
And you can't just get into everything.
|
| 00:17:04.000 |
Some books just don't speak to me.
|
| 00:17:07.800 |
But this idea of the bicameral mind of the Homeric,
|
| 00:17:10.040 |
our colleague Andrea Nightingale, who's
|
| 00:17:11.680 |
been a frequent guest on this show,
|
| 00:17:15.160 |
she's a classicist, and she's working on the Greek notions
|
| 00:17:19.200 |
about where thinking really happens.
|
| 00:17:21.000 |
And it doesn't happen in the brain.
|
| 00:17:22.920 |
It doesn't happen in the mind.
|
| 00:17:24.400 |
Oftentimes, it's in the chest, or it's in the limbs.
|
| 00:17:27.880 |
There's four different places, at least,
|
| 00:17:30.320 |
says Andrea Nightingale, where the Greeks thought
|
| 00:17:34.000 |
of thinking taking place.
|
| 00:17:36.000 |
And all of them connected to the body, by the way.
|
| 00:17:38.480 |
So this is not in any way different from what you're suggesting.
|
| 00:17:45.040 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:17:45.680 |
But this exclusive emphasis on a mind, which
|
| 00:17:50.520 |
is somehow a kind of center of operations
|
| 00:17:56.760 |
for the receiving and sending of messages,
|
| 00:17:59.680 |
maybe it could be expanded a bit.
|
| 00:18:02.720 |
But I mean, I agree with you.
|
| 00:18:05.000 |
Ideology, propaganda, all these things
|
| 00:18:07.560 |
would not work if the mind were not receptive by its nature.
|
| 00:18:10.920 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:18:11.400 |
It's too receptive.
|
| 00:18:12.440 |
That's even the problem that, to a certain degree,
|
| 00:18:14.840 |
I feel today we cannot really tell any more
|
| 00:18:17.480 |
to what extent are we doing the thinking
|
| 00:18:19.160 |
and to what extent are these intrusive thoughts
|
| 00:18:21.080 |
that we get through constant bombardment of messages
|
| 00:18:23.360 |
and information through social media?
|
| 00:18:25.240 |
So I would go back to what you said about policing
|
| 00:18:27.800 |
the mind.
|
| 00:18:28.240 |
I am absolutely against policing the mind.
|
| 00:18:30.280 |
And as I mentioned at the beginning of our talk today,
|
| 00:18:34.440 |
it is not about telling people what to think.
|
| 00:18:36.480 |
It's about training them how to recognize the pertinent
|
| 00:18:41.480 |
information and then how to deal with it
|
| 00:18:43.480 |
within their own solitude.
|
| 00:18:44.960 |
That is the issue.
|
| 00:18:45.840 |
And let me go to an article, since we've
|
| 00:18:48.200 |
been talking about all these New York Times articles recently
|
| 00:18:50.680 |
that came out in the topic of chat GPT,
|
| 00:18:52.960 |
I read one that actually Henry Kissinger wrote.
|
| 00:18:55.640 |
And I know one little anecdotal piece of information
|
| 00:18:59.520 |
about Henry Kissinger.
|
| 00:19:01.160 |
One book that he always kept on his nightstand
|
| 00:19:04.080 |
is Machiavelli's The Prince.
|
| 00:19:06.440 |
So that I find very interesting given our interest
|
| 00:19:10.560 |
in Italian literature here.
|
| 00:19:12.000 |
So he wrote an article alongside the CEO of Google
|
| 00:19:16.400 |
and a dean at MIT.
|
| 00:19:18.280 |
And they also like your friend Brian last week
|
| 00:19:21.120 |
and the way that I wrote it in my own essay for today
|
| 00:19:23.840 |
calls chat GPT, the genie, the genie of Gen tech.
|
| 00:19:28.160 |
Genie in the bottle.
|
| 00:19:29.040 |
Right, he says the genie of Gen tech is out of the bottle.
|
| 00:19:31.960 |
That's what he's saying.
|
| 00:19:32.920 |
And what does he suggest for us to do?
|
| 00:19:34.720 |
He writes, we use our brains less and our machines more.
|
| 00:19:38.080 |
Humans may lose some abilities, such as critical thinking,
|
| 00:19:41.040 |
writing, and design abilities.
|
| 00:19:42.880 |
So he proposes a certain kind of practice
|
| 00:19:44.800 |
of concerned skepticism or dialectical pedagogy
|
| 00:19:47.880 |
at the university in education.
|
| 00:19:49.360 |
So he writes very specifically, or they write,
|
| 00:19:51.400 |
our educational and professional systems
|
| 00:19:53.360 |
must preserve a vision of humans as moral,
|
| 00:19:56.120 |
psychological, and strategic creatures,
|
| 00:19:58.600 |
uniquely capable of rendering holistic judgments.
|
| 00:20:01.800 |
So this is where we need to take the reins,
|
| 00:20:05.240 |
so to say, let's say, in the humanistic disciplines,
|
| 00:20:08.000 |
in order to make sure that this internal dialogue is robust.
|
| 00:20:11.840 |
Let me tell you why I have doubts about that.
|
| 00:20:14.280 |
Yes, go ahead.
|
| 00:20:15.280 |
Because if you take the high degree quote
|
| 00:20:19.040 |
that the most thought-provoking thing about our age
|
| 00:20:21.920 |
is that we're still not thinking,
|
| 00:20:23.680 |
it goes back 150 years, or not 150 years,
|
| 00:20:27.400 |
goes back half a century.
|
| 00:20:30.560 |
Things have only gotten worse.
|
| 00:20:33.160 |
We, as educators, have seen, at least in three decades,
|
| 00:20:37.840 |
teaching, how much what writing skills, thinking skills,
|
| 00:20:44.840 |
everything seems to me in a state of collapse,
|
| 00:20:49.280 |
precisely because we don't have concentrated attention.
|
| 00:20:53.480 |
It could be the cell phone, it could be social media.
|
| 00:20:57.040 |
And any number of culprits can be pointed to.
|
| 00:21:01.680 |
But perhaps something like artificial intelligence,
|
| 00:21:05.920 |
and it's coming at the right time to save us
|
| 00:21:10.000 |
from our own kind of dissolution.
|
| 00:21:13.080 |
And this idea that we have to hold on
|
| 00:21:15.440 |
to our critical thinking abilities and everything
|
| 00:21:18.400 |
that Kissinger is worried about is losing,
|
| 00:21:21.400 |
we have lost them almost fully compared to what it used to be.
|
| 00:21:28.920 |
So things are not going to get better by clinging on
|
| 00:21:32.400 |
to the little vestiges of what used to be
|
| 00:21:34.840 |
a holistic way of forming moral judgments
|
| 00:21:39.200 |
and critical thinking and synthesis of these sorts.
|
| 00:21:43.200 |
So perhaps we need an artificial help
|
| 00:21:49.480 |
to save us from ourselves.
|
| 00:21:52.200 |
I don't know.
|
| 00:21:53.120 |
I just throw that idea out.
|
| 00:21:54.560 |
Right.
|
| 00:21:55.160 |
That is very interesting.
|
| 00:21:56.560 |
I mean, I don't trust educators more than I trust
|
| 00:22:02.120 |
the artificial intelligence.
|
| 00:22:03.440 |
Because I see sometimes what our edge--
|
| 00:22:05.520 |
well, no one goes to speak ill.
|
| 00:22:09.360 |
So we had this conversation about education.
|
| 00:22:12.040 |
So what do I see particularly problematic
|
| 00:22:14.920 |
about the educational system, especially in the US
|
| 00:22:17.680 |
currently?
|
| 00:22:18.680 |
I mean, I was a graduate student here.
|
| 00:22:19.560 |
I went through various universities.
|
| 00:22:22.120 |
What I felt-- and I'm a recent PhD--
|
| 00:22:25.480 |
was overly emphasized in our education
|
| 00:22:28.120 |
is definitely writing.
|
| 00:22:29.760 |
Writing.
|
| 00:22:30.160 |
Writing centers, writing tutors.
|
| 00:22:31.800 |
We write papers, dissertations,
|
| 00:22:33.860 |
liquid fermentation letters, cvs.
|
| 00:22:36.360 |
My entire career, so to say, is a graduate student
|
| 00:22:38.640 |
was spent doing that, doing writing.
|
| 00:22:41.160 |
Now we charge a P.T. with the arrival of this new technology
|
| 00:22:44.240 |
into our lives.
|
| 00:22:45.880 |
It just shows to educational institutions
|
| 00:22:48.760 |
how peripheral actually writing is.
|
| 00:22:51.040 |
Because if an artificial intelligence can do that,
|
| 00:22:53.320 |
then what do we do at the university as professors,
|
| 00:22:55.840 |
as lecturers?
|
| 00:22:56.560 |
What are we going to teach students anymore
|
| 00:22:58.120 |
if we've made writing so central to our pedagogy?
|
| 00:23:01.520 |
So this is where I think a shift to thinking has to happen.
|
| 00:23:04.480 |
You mean away from writing?
|
| 00:23:05.800 |
Away from writing, yes.
|
| 00:23:06.880 |
Well, listen, the billions and trillions of dollars
|
| 00:23:10.440 |
that the US government spends on development
|
| 00:23:14.600 |
of writing skills.
|
| 00:23:15.760 |
Because you're absolutely right.
|
| 00:23:16.720 |
Education is not only at the university level,
|
| 00:23:19.080 |
throughout grade school and high school,
|
| 00:23:21.880 |
writing is king.
|
| 00:23:24.640 |
And the more money that's being spent,
|
| 00:23:26.640 |
the more time that goes by, the worse the writing gets.
|
| 00:23:29.680 |
I hate to say this on KZSU Stanford University,
|
| 00:23:33.480 |
but the Stanford students, the undergraduates,
|
| 00:23:36.480 |
and oftentimes graduate.
|
| 00:23:38.440 |
The writing is appalling, and it's gotten worse.
|
| 00:23:42.040 |
So actually, when I read an essay written by a chat
|
| 00:23:47.360 |
GPT machine, all of a sudden, it's a relief.
|
| 00:23:51.680 |
I can breathe again, because it's organized.
|
| 00:23:54.440 |
It's clear and distinct, and it follows a certain kind
|
| 00:23:57.480 |
of thesis.
|
| 00:23:58.000 |
And how refreshing is that compared to the coiled
|
| 00:24:04.200 |
and confused writing, which is more
|
| 00:24:07.120 |
the norm than the exception, even at elites,
|
| 00:24:11.760 |
universities like Stanford.
|
| 00:24:13.560 |
Well, to answer that question, I will mention John
|
| 00:24:17.120 |
Gilery, whose book we discussed recently,
|
| 00:24:18.960 |
"Professor and Criticism" that just came out last year.
|
| 00:24:21.880 |
Well, he sees the diminishing of quality in writing
|
| 00:24:27.360 |
and student writing as a direct product of the lack
|
| 00:24:30.320 |
of reading that this is wise to--
|
| 00:24:32.800 |
Exactly.
|
| 00:24:33.600 |
--right, exactly.
|
| 00:24:34.680 |
Exactly.
|
| 00:24:35.360 |
I agree with that.
|
| 00:24:36.320 |
So what is the problem now with chat GPT?
|
| 00:24:39.360 |
The first impetus of Stanford University and professors
|
| 00:24:42.920 |
in general has been to ban it, right?
|
| 00:24:44.680 |
Do not allow it in the classroom.
|
| 00:24:47.320 |
I allowed it to my students this quarter,
|
| 00:24:49.280 |
and I encouraged them to do their final papers
|
| 00:24:51.720 |
by consulting chat GPT.
|
| 00:24:53.040 |
And they came out of the experience quite level headed.
|
| 00:24:57.040 |
They founded a very useful tool, and it gave them more time
|
| 00:24:59.720 |
to develop their own ideas.
|
| 00:25:01.480 |
And I have to tell you-- we spoke about this.
|
| 00:25:03.040 |
Just in February, I attended the first ever industry
|
| 00:25:06.760 |
conference on generative AI.
|
| 00:25:08.880 |
This was organized by a company called Jasper.
|
| 00:25:11.080 |
They have their own type of chat GPT.
|
| 00:25:13.800 |
And I listened to the whole conference,
|
| 00:25:15.480 |
and it was quite interesting because the coders,
|
| 00:25:17.760 |
the very people who are making this technology,
|
| 00:25:20.200 |
are also level headed about what it will do to us.
|
| 00:25:22.760 |
And I will give you one quote by Nat Friedman.
|
| 00:25:25.240 |
He's the former CEO of GitHub and MIT graduate.
|
| 00:25:28.080 |
He said one thing during the conference.
|
| 00:25:29.480 |
He said what chat GPT will do is
|
| 00:25:31.160 |
going to rewrite civilization.
|
| 00:25:33.160 |
He didn't say it's going to transform civilization.
|
| 00:25:36.720 |
He didn't use Thomas Friedman words from the New York Times
|
| 00:25:40.200 |
that it's transformational, that it's a tornado, a promethean
|
| 00:25:43.000 |
moment.
|
| 00:25:43.560 |
He said it's going to rewrite civilization.
|
| 00:25:46.080 |
And then Megan Anderson, from Jasper's marketing,
|
| 00:25:49.080 |
said very clearly that we need to reinvest,
|
| 00:25:51.880 |
so to say, in content, not composition.
|
| 00:25:55.000 |
Let the best content win.
|
| 00:25:57.600 |
This is a strategy.
|
| 00:25:58.400 |
This is how people around generate a very eye-curranty market
|
| 00:26:01.840 |
the product.
|
| 00:26:02.360 |
It's about letting you to have free time to develop your ideas
|
| 00:26:06.160 |
and not spend time on writing.
|
| 00:26:07.680 |
Now, here is the most difficult question.
|
| 00:26:10.160 |
If-- and the question that I think we definitely
|
| 00:26:12.840 |
need to address as a society, especially educators.
|
| 00:26:15.680 |
So if chat GPT and all these technologies,
|
| 00:26:18.600 |
such as Bard, Sydney, Bloom, that are being developed
|
| 00:26:22.560 |
by competitors, if they can allow us now
|
| 00:26:24.800 |
to spend more time developing our ideas,
|
| 00:26:27.200 |
just editing the text rather than creating the form,
|
| 00:26:30.960 |
then what do we fill the space that remains empty?
|
| 00:26:35.160 |
What do we do at the university, let's say,
|
| 00:26:38.960 |
because this is our particular profession,
|
| 00:26:41.640 |
where we usually teach form.
|
| 00:26:43.520 |
We teach form.
|
| 00:26:44.320 |
We teach how to write a text, what to write in a specific
|
| 00:26:47.360 |
paragraph.
|
| 00:26:47.800 |
Well, if chat GPT can do that to us,
|
| 00:26:50.240 |
what is left than for us as educators?
|
| 00:26:52.120 |
And how do we fill that space?
|
| 00:26:53.800 |
That is the question for me.
|
| 00:26:55.280 |
Can I give you a very simple answer
|
| 00:26:56.960 |
we'll do with that with that leisure?
|
| 00:27:00.120 |
And I'm going to sound like Vernor Herzog here.
|
| 00:27:02.040 |
Read, read, read, read, read, read.
|
| 00:27:05.520 |
That's Vernor Herzog.
|
| 00:27:06.920 |
And it's the simple and most obvious, evident answer
|
| 00:27:14.680 |
to this question, because you're not
|
| 00:27:17.360 |
going to develop ideas and avoid.
|
| 00:27:20.800 |
You can't ask students to sit back.
|
| 00:27:22.360 |
It's like they come into a class, they're a freshman,
|
| 00:27:24.840 |
or they're sophomores and things.
|
| 00:27:26.600 |
And we have so-called educators or instructors who say, OK,
|
| 00:27:30.840 |
here, what do you think about this?
|
| 00:27:33.360 |
They haven't even learned anything.
|
| 00:27:34.640 |
And you're asking, what do they think about something
|
| 00:27:36.960 |
that they haven't even learned?
|
| 00:27:38.360 |
How about reading, reading, reading, learning?
|
| 00:27:42.320 |
Become full of multiplicity of voices that come
|
| 00:27:48.160 |
from different sources.
|
| 00:27:49.600 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:27:50.160 |
Yes, I see what you mean, Robert, for sure.
|
| 00:27:52.080 |
There is a specific historical reason, though, why,
|
| 00:27:55.480 |
currently human beings in general are not very interested
|
| 00:28:00.400 |
in reading.
|
| 00:28:01.040 |
First, let me say that I do not agree with Heidegger
|
| 00:28:03.200 |
when he said that we're still not thinking.
|
| 00:28:05.040 |
I would rather say that we're not thinking anymore.
|
| 00:28:07.760 |
And there is a specific reason for it.
|
| 00:28:09.360 |
So I studied the 19th century, and I've
|
| 00:28:11.520 |
done quite a lot of reading on the debates
|
| 00:28:13.600 |
that arose there about industrialization.
|
| 00:28:16.240 |
So one thing that happened in the 19th century
|
| 00:28:18.400 |
is the overstimulation of our cognitive apparatus
|
| 00:28:22.400 |
that began with the industrial revelation,
|
| 00:28:24.400 |
with the proliferation of choices,
|
| 00:28:26.400 |
a massment of products, devices, we can blame capitalism for it,
|
| 00:28:30.160 |
we can blame the bourgeoisie, whatever
|
| 00:28:33.440 |
we'd like to think.
|
| 00:28:34.720 |
So we have more career options, more partners
|
| 00:28:36.920 |
to choose for more entertainment.
|
| 00:28:38.640 |
So there is an emasement of information
|
| 00:28:41.160 |
you call it noise that started hitting us for all sides.
|
| 00:28:44.720 |
I can start speaking about Western Europe,
|
| 00:28:46.280 |
but now we know exactly how this is filled.
|
| 00:28:48.480 |
So what is the result of this overstimulation?
|
| 00:28:51.000 |
It leads to difficulties in decision-making.
|
| 00:28:53.760 |
We don't know what partner to choose.
|
| 00:28:55.960 |
We don't know what's right from wrong.
|
| 00:28:57.680 |
We can't tell.
|
| 00:28:58.720 |
We don't know what product to choose.
|
| 00:29:00.120 |
So we've created all these technologies,
|
| 00:29:02.320 |
these neural extensions of ourselves,
|
| 00:29:04.440 |
to alleviate the process.
|
| 00:29:05.760 |
They algorithm suggests what's the next thing
|
| 00:29:08.280 |
we are going to buy.
|
| 00:29:09.440 |
They tell us what's the next restaurant we should go.
|
| 00:29:11.320 |
So all of this allows us not to make choices.
|
| 00:29:14.400 |
It's created a sort of-- how do we call it?
|
| 00:29:19.360 |
A brain full of paraphernalia.
|
| 00:29:21.920 |
Our brains are completely cluttered with information,
|
| 00:29:25.240 |
so that we cannot possibly squeeze reading
|
| 00:29:29.160 |
into this situation, because on one hand, again,
|
| 00:29:31.520 |
our brains are completely cluttered.
|
| 00:29:33.160 |
Let's call them-- our minds are completely cluttered
|
| 00:29:35.040 |
with information, media, messages, headlines, anxieties.
|
| 00:29:38.120 |
And on the other hand, they're silenced.
|
| 00:29:40.040 |
And how do we do this?
|
| 00:29:40.840 |
We do this to a magic medication.
|
| 00:29:42.600 |
We go to therapy.
|
| 00:29:43.880 |
We do everything to silence the overwhelming amount of voices
|
| 00:29:47.960 |
that we hear in our own heads.
|
| 00:29:50.120 |
So now, what should--
|
| 00:29:52.320 |
But you asked, what are we supposed to do with our leisure?
|
| 00:29:54.840 |
If the artificial intelligence technology gives us
|
| 00:29:58.920 |
this extra leisure, I tried to answer it by saying, well,
|
| 00:30:02.440 |
maybe a little more reading wouldn't hurt, no?
|
| 00:30:04.840 |
Right.
|
| 00:30:05.120 |
But first, we have to draw attention, I think,
|
| 00:30:07.160 |
to how cluttered the mind currently is.
|
| 00:30:09.720 |
We need to draw attention to people's habits
|
| 00:30:12.320 |
of what we do when we get home at night.
|
| 00:30:15.000 |
We spend our entire days working, planning, organizing,
|
| 00:30:18.720 |
with machines, creating all sorts of schemes of how
|
| 00:30:23.440 |
to go through our day.
|
| 00:30:24.800 |
And then we come back at home at night,
|
| 00:30:26.320 |
and instead of retreating into solitude,
|
| 00:30:28.520 |
which would be something that we need to do in the evening
|
| 00:30:30.560 |
in order to come back to ourselves to meet that other fellow.
|
| 00:30:34.480 |
We engage in even more clattering of information.
|
| 00:30:37.440 |
I mean, I do it.
|
| 00:30:38.440 |
We swear.
|
| 00:30:39.240 |
So your proposal sounds very much like mine.
|
| 00:30:42.280 |
That you retreat into solitude.
|
| 00:30:44.920 |
So how do we do that?
|
| 00:30:46.160 |
How do we do it?
|
| 00:30:47.240 |
Right.
|
| 00:30:48.040 |
So I think it's important here to talk about solitude.
|
| 00:30:51.920 |
It hasn't been spoken much about this concept.
|
| 00:30:55.280 |
We speak a lot about loneliness.
|
| 00:30:57.160 |
And I remember Robert when I first came to Stanford,
|
| 00:31:00.240 |
we got a beer at the local pub.
|
| 00:31:02.600 |
And one of the first things that she told me
|
| 00:31:04.320 |
was there's a lot of loneliness around here, which set
|
| 00:31:08.880 |
the stage for me and was very unexpected,
|
| 00:31:10.680 |
because I imagine I will come to California.
|
| 00:31:13.440 |
The weather is great.
|
| 00:31:14.320 |
Everyone is so casual.
|
| 00:31:16.760 |
So it will be very easy to meet people.
|
| 00:31:18.560 |
But you're right.
|
| 00:31:19.280 |
In the most technological place in the world
|
| 00:31:21.560 |
where there are millions of people, so many smart people
|
| 00:31:24.320 |
coming around, there's a lot of loneliness.
|
| 00:31:27.800 |
However, the Norwegian philosopher, Lars Svensson,
|
| 00:31:32.360 |
wrote a book called The Philosophy of Loneliness.
|
| 00:31:35.080 |
And in this book, he makes a very clear cut distinction
|
| 00:31:37.800 |
between loneliness and solitude.
|
| 00:31:40.080 |
These are two different concepts.
|
| 00:31:42.120 |
In loneliness, we are scrolling on our phones.
|
| 00:31:45.320 |
We are going to the gym.
|
| 00:31:46.720 |
We are going to meditation and to yoga.
|
| 00:31:48.840 |
We're still filling up the place when we're lonely.
|
| 00:31:52.160 |
Some people, excuse me, some people who meditate and go to yoga
|
| 00:31:54.880 |
say that they're doing exactly what you're recommending.
|
| 00:31:57.040 |
They're going inside themselves and trying to find that
|
| 00:32:00.280 |
still point, turning world.
|
| 00:32:02.880 |
I cannot comment on that because I'm not a yoga person,
|
| 00:32:06.480 |
but I do feel that meditation in yoga are supposed to empty you
|
| 00:32:10.680 |
out of the words and the words that you have.
|
| 00:32:13.640 |
They're decluttering, but they're not necessarily providing
|
| 00:32:16.280 |
supplements, so to say.
|
| 00:32:17.720 |
So we need a supplement for whatever we're purging out of
|
| 00:32:20.960 |
ourselves.
|
| 00:32:21.800 |
So right?
|
| 00:32:22.800 |
We need norms for what we should think about.
|
| 00:32:24.960 |
Now, what do you mean by supplements?
|
| 00:32:28.280 |
Again, we don't need norms.
|
| 00:32:30.320 |
We need a bit more moral guidance.
|
| 00:32:33.840 |
And in this argument, I'm specifically thinking about the new
|
| 00:32:39.600 |
realism philosophical movement that is coming out of Europe
|
| 00:32:42.240 |
right now.
|
| 00:32:43.120 |
We talked about Marcus Gabriel, Marizzio Ferraris, is one of
|
| 00:32:46.040 |
those other thinkers who have discussed the consequences of
|
| 00:32:52.160 |
postmodernism on our society, on our education, and the way we
|
| 00:32:55.600 |
think today.
|
| 00:32:56.920 |
So they're calling for a certain return to moral and ethical
|
| 00:33:00.880 |
questions.
|
| 00:33:01.800 |
And I don't think it's just the task of philosophy,
|
| 00:33:03.840 |
currently.
|
| 00:33:04.200 |
It's not just philosophers.
|
| 00:33:05.120 |
They are doing all over the world here at Stanford, the
|
| 00:33:07.680 |
human centered, AI centered, we have here everywhere.
|
| 00:33:11.040 |
We're trying to think more about ethics, right?
|
| 00:33:13.200 |
We're trying to think about how to regulate these new
|
| 00:33:17.160 |
technologies that are coming to us.
|
| 00:33:18.920 |
However, is that real thinking or is it just more noise?
|
| 00:33:22.520 |
It's a start.
|
| 00:33:23.560 |
It's a start.
|
| 00:33:24.160 |
However, this is where I see the difference.
|
| 00:33:26.440 |
Whereas the industry and professional philosophers, so to
|
| 00:33:31.560 |
say, see the solution in ethics in specific moral values that
|
| 00:33:38.320 |
are valid for everyone, I see the question as being born
|
| 00:33:43.040 |
absolutely in the mind, in the individual mind.
|
| 00:33:46.680 |
That's where we start building better citizens.
|
| 00:33:49.680 |
That's where we train people to think in a more robust way and
|
| 00:33:53.720 |
be able to decide for themselves what is right or wrong or
|
| 00:33:56.640 |
what is information, what is knowledge, what is clutter, right?
|
| 00:34:00.200 |
Or what is an actual thought-provoking event, right?
|
| 00:34:03.440 |
There's a lot of confusion.
|
| 00:34:04.320 |
I think one of the reasons why we're experienced is kind of
|
| 00:34:06.600 |
clutter is precisely of this infosphere in which we live.
|
| 00:34:11.040 |
This is a Luciano-Fluerides term.
|
| 00:34:14.560 |
We have confused throughout the past decades, especially
|
| 00:34:18.840 |
through the arrival of the worldwide web, we've confused
|
| 00:34:21.400 |
knowledge with information.
|
| 00:34:23.480 |
And we further conflate those two with thinking.
|
| 00:34:27.440 |
But these three concepts are quite distinct from one another.
|
| 00:34:31.800 |
So this is something that we need to teach, we need to make sure
|
| 00:34:35.120 |
that people are aware of this difference so that they can
|
| 00:34:38.040 |
acknowledge for themselves and recognize what is information,
|
| 00:34:40.960 |
what kind of knowledge are they being given, what can be
|
| 00:34:43.200 |
questioned, what cannot be questioned, right?
|
| 00:34:45.160 |
So there is a return to that, but again, for me, the important
|
| 00:34:47.280 |
part.
|
| 00:34:47.800 |
>> How does that differ from what traditionally was being
|
| 00:34:51.720 |
called critical thinking?
|
| 00:34:54.000 |
>> Which universities have always presumed to teach
|
| 00:34:59.720 |
person foremost?
|
| 00:35:00.880 |
>> Yeah.
|
| 00:35:01.960 |
That is the ideal mission of the university.
|
| 00:35:06.120 |
Critical thinking, however, on the ground does not really have,
|
| 00:35:10.440 |
I think, any more to do with questioning things.
|
| 00:35:13.440 |
It's not that high-to-garian questioning where you just take
|
| 00:35:15.680 |
apart an argument.
|
| 00:35:17.040 |
Critical thinking currently has more to do with theory and
|
| 00:35:21.400 |
with method.
|
| 00:35:23.280 |
I, for myself, I don't think of thinking in the solitary, thoughtful
|
| 00:35:30.800 |
sense of thinking as being directly related to critical thinking.
|
| 00:35:38.000 |
I think again, it's a kind of opening of whatever region of
|
| 00:35:45.360 |
the self.
|
| 00:35:52.360 |
It is that receives subterranean messages from, I can call it the world of the dead,
|
| 00:35:56.680 |
because every time you open a book and you're reading words on a page,
|
| 00:36:03.960 |
it's a voice that gets reanimated within the psyche, in the mind that's coming from
|
| 00:36:13.240 |
the past and coming from the realm of the ghosts of the authors who wrote them.
|
| 00:36:18.680 |
I mean 99% of the books we read are authored by dead people after.
|
| 00:36:23.720 |
So I'm not trying to be spooky.
|
| 00:36:25.400 |
I'm just in a very self-evident way, saying that learning how to institute a
|
| 00:36:33.640 |
dialogue with the dead is as important as a dialogue with oneself, because
|
| 00:36:40.080 |
one self is that self that you want to be in dialogue with is a very learned
|
| 00:36:46.440 |
itself.
|
| 00:36:48.240 |
And as you say, if you fill it with nonsense, it will respond with nonsense.
|
| 00:36:53.480 |
So you raise a lot of interesting methodological questions.
|
| 00:36:56.160 |
How do you declutter it?
|
| 00:36:58.240 |
How do you guide it?
|
| 00:37:00.200 |
How do you give it a moral inflection, so on and so forth?
|
| 00:37:05.080 |
But here I'm going to ask you the tough question because you keep using the
|
| 00:37:09.720 |
pronoun 'we' and I think that you mean educators and professors at universities.
|
| 00:37:16.720 |
But I'm perhaps a little less sanguine about presuming to be the adjudicator, the
|
| 00:37:25.200 |
legislature, of what should enter the mind and what should not enter the mind.
|
| 00:37:32.200 |
If I trusted my colleagues more than I actually do to actually navigate that distinction,
|
| 00:37:44.080 |
and it would be fine.
|
| 00:37:45.600 |
But it depends on who is doing the policing again.
|
| 00:37:52.880 |
Right, I mean here we come back to the logistical question of thinking.
|
| 00:37:57.600 |
This is what I think is perhaps the most difficult task, but it also the university and
|
| 00:38:04.280 |
our profession lends itself very well to it without being the police, so to say, behind
|
| 00:38:09.720 |
the thinking mode.
|
| 00:38:10.960 |
We need a space.
|
| 00:38:11.960 |
We simply need a space, a physical space out there first, in which reading and speaking
|
| 00:38:19.240 |
and listening to one another can be made possible in direct human face-to-face interactions.
|
| 00:38:25.520 |
We cannot replace that with Twitter where most of people today get their information,
|
| 00:38:30.640 |
right?
|
| 00:38:31.640 |
That's where the food for thought today comes from, because simply there is not accountability
|
| 00:38:34.920 |
when you are interacting with virtual beings.
|
| 00:38:38.160 |
So the university, again, not so much as a policing instance, but simply as a provider
|
| 00:38:43.680 |
of the physical, first the physical space can play a significant role there.
|
| 00:38:48.000 |
And that physical space in a way, it's sacred.
|
| 00:38:50.120 |
That's where the practice of judgment comes together.
|
| 00:38:52.920 |
So what we can do is, this is the basic structure of how we teach, right?
|
| 00:38:57.760 |
We assign a text or we choose an artwork where human experience is sedimented.
|
| 00:39:04.360 |
Literature in particular lends itself so beautifully to the study of human nature and
|
| 00:39:08.960 |
our internal dialogue, because we have layers and layers of sedimentation, of experimentation,
|
| 00:39:15.400 |
of various points of view of how people think and make decisions.
|
| 00:39:19.160 |
So when we assign a text like that and we gather together in a room or even outdoors,
|
| 00:39:24.120 |
like Socrates and his peers used to do, and we come together around the text, each one of
|
| 00:39:29.720 |
us starts perhaps with an opinion.
|
| 00:39:32.080 |
But by confronting our opinions with one another, we hone our skills, we practice our
|
| 00:39:37.960 |
judgment so that then even Socrates, our own rights after having spent the day on the
|
| 00:39:43.640 |
marketplace, goes home and meets the other fellow, right?
|
| 00:39:47.160 |
After we have had the chance to practice our opinions, to practice expressing judgment,
|
| 00:39:51.200 |
and I'm not saying here moral judgment or just the evaluation of aesthetic judgment,
|
| 00:39:56.040 |
but just working with others who have different perspectives, then we can go home and meet
|
| 00:40:01.080 |
the other fellow and then have that conversation.
|
| 00:40:04.040 |
But this I think can only happen really in a one-on-one situation.
|
| 00:40:08.000 |
We need the human body, we need the authority of the body.
|
| 00:40:10.880 |
And this is why, for instance, Ariane DeGin also writes that human beings, man, are thought
|
| 00:40:15.560 |
becomes flesh.
|
| 00:40:17.440 |
That thought needs to confront itself in the flesh.
|
| 00:40:20.760 |
Sounds very much like a classroom to me.
|
| 00:40:23.560 |
Absolutely, absolutely.
|
| 00:40:25.720 |
However, we are quite aware, Robert, both of us, and I'm a very young scholar and on the
|
| 00:40:31.480 |
job market, how the classroom works today.
|
| 00:40:34.160 |
We are, in a way, obliged to work with all these new technologies to engage in digital
|
| 00:40:40.200 |
humanities, to study media, whatever, but it does not feel like it is something that
|
| 00:40:45.120 |
promotes thinking but replaces it.
|
| 00:40:48.120 |
All the logistics of dealing with new technologies create even less space for thinking.
|
| 00:40:53.840 |
Can you speak now more directly about GPT and why you have serious questions about the role
|
| 00:41:02.560 |
it's going to play in enabling the process of creating more emptiness for the solitary
|
| 00:41:12.200 |
sort, the productive sort.
|
| 00:41:15.200 |
So how can GPT or let's call it just generative AI, can they make space for us?
|
| 00:41:23.240 |
Can they provide that space where we can promote thinking?
|
| 00:41:27.360 |
Or the other question is whether those technologies actually will start thinking themselves
|
| 00:41:31.400 |
in that development of the bi-camera-almine.
|
| 00:41:33.240 |
So it could be both ways.
|
| 00:41:34.760 |
Well, I can start with just saying that the debate out there is very vibrant on this technology,
|
| 00:41:41.720 |
and as I quoted Thomas Friedman before he was speaking over a Permethian moment, and there
|
| 00:41:45.360 |
is pretty much the same types of camps about this technology that we have in the 19th century.
|
| 00:41:50.560 |
It's, every time some kind of new product comes into the world, there are the same reactions.
|
| 00:41:55.920 |
This is something that hasn't changed.
|
| 00:41:57.120 |
And you think it's overblown?
|
| 00:41:59.080 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:42:00.080 |
I don't.
|
| 00:42:01.080 |
Yes, we disagree on this.
|
| 00:42:02.640 |
I think it is Prometheus.
|
| 00:42:04.440 |
Okay, for me, the use of the Permethian analogy is problematic because then it asks the
|
| 00:42:14.480 |
question of who is Prometheus, right?
|
| 00:42:16.520 |
Who is the one who is bringing this new technology to us when newspaper people, journalists
|
| 00:42:24.480 |
write about this, they always tend to create a metaphor out of this new technology.
|
| 00:42:30.440 |
But this technology is not a metaphor, it's something very concrete.
|
| 00:42:33.240 |
Well, I can say that when the smartphone came into being, and especially the iPhone, I was telling
|
| 00:42:41.640 |
people this is going to completely change, I didn't say rewrite civilization, but this
|
| 00:42:46.520 |
is completely going to transform human civilization.
|
| 00:42:49.720 |
Everyone thought that was humorous, if not ridiculous.
|
| 00:42:53.560 |
And of course, yes, yes, every time there's a new technology, everyone says that.
|
| 00:42:59.360 |
And yet there is, I think history is divided between AI and a BUI, namely before the iPhone
|
| 00:43:11.680 |
and after the iPhone, where iPhone stands for the device by which Twitter, social media,
|
| 00:43:20.280 |
the worldwide web, fake news, all these things come to us in our hands.
|
| 00:43:26.800 |
And so I don't think it was overblown at all.
|
| 00:43:29.520 |
In 2005, to say that human civilization has undergone is going to undergo a fundamental
|
| 00:43:39.080 |
concussion at its foundations.
|
| 00:43:41.040 |
Well, in this aspect, I tend to side with two scholars.
|
| 00:43:47.440 |
One is Kate Crawford, who wrote Atlas of AI in which he demonstrates very clearly that
|
| 00:43:51.840 |
the entire hype around generative artificial intelligence has masked a lot of socioeconomic
|
| 00:43:59.040 |
day-to-day practices out there, which she's using a term from someone else.
|
| 00:44:05.080 |
It's called "fautomation."
|
| 00:44:06.080 |
She speaks of "fautomation."
|
| 00:44:07.960 |
That there are actually businesses today that hire human beings to pretend that they're
|
| 00:44:14.520 |
AI's.
|
| 00:44:15.840 |
And this is part of the process, right?
|
| 00:44:17.600 |
Well, on one side, we are celebrating this new Promethean technology on the other side.
|
| 00:44:22.680 |
Companies are actually trying to seem more as if they had AI.
|
| 00:44:25.920 |
So this is not to say it's not just problematic, but it's highly immoral, right?
|
| 00:44:30.160 |
But that also exposes of how overblown the moment to a certain degree is.
|
| 00:44:34.800 |
And again, like I said, with Crawford on this, and in particular with no, I'm Chomsky,
|
| 00:44:38.960 |
who also recently published an article in The New York Times in which pretty much says
|
| 00:44:45.160 |
human beings just think differently, we deal with language differently.
|
| 00:44:48.600 |
And what this technology and this is my particular take does is again, it presses us into
|
| 00:44:54.400 |
a corner to figure out again, what is it that makes us particularly specifically human?
|
| 00:45:00.440 |
And it cannot be writing.
|
| 00:45:01.640 |
This is at least another piece of the puzzle that Chad GPT now showed us to us.
|
| 00:45:06.040 |
It that is not creativity, learning, writing, aren't what makes us completely, specifically
|
| 00:45:12.600 |
human.
|
| 00:45:13.600 |
We should de-emphasize writing in our curriculum.
|
| 00:45:17.760 |
I do.
|
| 00:45:18.760 |
I mean, I think it's, well, on the one hand, I do on the one hand, I don't.
|
| 00:45:23.440 |
I think that sloppy writing, which is the norm in institutions of higher education, even,
|
| 00:45:31.440 |
is a manifestation of an inability to think and that you're not going to get better writing
|
| 00:45:37.040 |
until you get better thinking and you're not going to get better thinking until you have
|
| 00:45:40.640 |
more thoughtful reading.
|
| 00:45:43.840 |
Ideally, it should be a conglomeration of these skills of writing, speaking, listening,
|
| 00:45:47.840 |
reading and thinking.
|
| 00:45:49.200 |
All of those should be fostered equally at the university.
|
| 00:45:51.680 |
However, the tendency of the latest generation has been to teach us mostly how to write
|
| 00:45:58.600 |
and a certain kind of reading that is very methodological.
|
| 00:46:01.840 |
It's very directed towards the discipline.
|
| 00:46:04.000 |
But at the end of the day, the biggest space should be left to thinking to discussing these
|
| 00:46:07.960 |
texts with our peers.
|
| 00:46:09.680 |
This is why I encourage students to use these new technologies to help themselves prove
|
| 00:46:14.640 |
their texts.
|
| 00:46:15.640 |
They're making them come to the classroom and have more discussion.
|
| 00:46:17.920 |
But this, of course, puts a lot of questions out there.
|
| 00:46:20.440 |
How do we grade then students?
|
| 00:46:22.480 |
How do we evaluate it?
|
| 00:46:23.480 |
Well, maybe there is the time is ripe for us to move from those kind of grading systems,
|
| 00:46:28.080 |
which are based just on textual evidence and just promote more thinking in the classroom.
|
| 00:46:32.520 |
Yeah, I agree.
|
| 00:46:34.960 |
What we need is an extended sabbatical at all levels for students no more papers for one
|
| 00:46:41.080 |
year.
|
| 00:46:42.080 |
You don't write one paper, you just read nothing more to do.
|
| 00:46:45.360 |
And for faculty members and lecturers, a ban on conferences and symposia and academic
|
| 00:46:53.040 |
lectures for one year.
|
| 00:46:55.040 |
Maybe they also can go back and do some reading.
|
| 00:46:58.800 |
So absolutely.
|
| 00:46:59.800 |
Robert, we're saying this in very banal terms.
|
| 00:47:02.240 |
It would almost sound to someone who listens to us that we're just complaining about
|
| 00:47:05.520 |
our profession.
|
| 00:47:06.880 |
But again, when I attended this latest conference or the first conference of Generative AI
|
| 00:47:12.160 |
in San Francisco, one thing that became quite clear to me that what this technology will
|
| 00:47:17.480 |
do is it will change education.
|
| 00:47:21.680 |
This is perhaps the branch of our culture, of our D institution today that is mostly going
|
| 00:47:28.360 |
to be impacted by these technologies and journalists, tech people, businessmen, they all agree.
|
| 00:47:34.640 |
However, in these conversations that I have attended, usually there are no representatives
|
| 00:47:38.600 |
from our neck of the woods, almost as if it didn't concern us.
|
| 00:47:42.120 |
So if the universities, if we do not embrace these technologies, like for instance, when
|
| 00:47:48.280 |
Wikipedia first came out, right?
|
| 00:47:50.240 |
My professors at least at the time when I was an undergrad prohibited me from the
|
| 00:47:54.720 |
prohibited us from using Wikipedia, the result was pretty much catastrophic because students
|
| 00:47:59.240 |
still would cheat and they would not double check the information, right?
|
| 00:48:02.400 |
So now we have charge of GPT, we cannot prohibit students from using it.
|
| 00:48:06.160 |
We have to teach them how and what kind of questions to ask and what to expect from it, right?
|
| 00:48:11.480 |
What you mentioned earlier is even though there weren't educators present at that conference,
|
| 00:48:16.560 |
the threat of GPT for as far as I understand it and generative AI is to take away jobs
|
| 00:48:25.160 |
from the white collar.
|
| 00:48:26.560 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:48:27.560 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:48:28.560 |
Which is, you know, finally there would be a little bit of justice in that I mean,
|
| 00:48:34.560 |
you know me, I'm not far from being a Marxist.
|
| 00:48:38.440 |
However, it seems like it's the blue collar workers who have been getting screwed for
|
| 00:48:43.680 |
the last few decades, you know, since Reagan is at least.
|
| 00:48:49.120 |
And the white collar class now is going to feel the repercussions of this technology, I think
|
| 00:48:57.240 |
in the way the blue collar workers felt the outsourcing of jobs to other countries and
|
| 00:49:03.240 |
so forth.
|
| 00:49:04.240 |
Yes, that became quite clear.
|
| 00:49:05.840 |
The white collar workers, coders also, coders and producers.
|
| 00:49:09.560 |
Journalist, professors, writers, everyone who has to do something, yes, with a written
|
| 00:49:15.400 |
word are pretty much replaceable now by this new technology.
|
| 00:49:19.880 |
So this is why, you know, I suggested in the first place that we do this show so that we
|
| 00:49:23.760 |
can think about the implications of these new technologies specifically for everyone who
|
| 00:49:28.240 |
depends on writing.
|
| 00:49:32.560 |
So if we can end this conversation by actually hearing the opinion or opinion, hearing the
|
| 00:49:39.680 |
prediction of CHAGEPT itself on this topic, I actually asked it some of the questions
|
| 00:49:44.840 |
that we discussed today.
|
| 00:49:46.160 |
So first of all, I asked it what happens when the structuring of cognitive language
|
| 00:49:50.800 |
abilities is relinquished to an external artificial agent such as CHAGEPT.
|
| 00:49:55.440 |
And CHAGEPT answered.
|
| 00:49:56.960 |
It is important to know that while CHAGEPT can generate text and structure language,
|
| 00:50:01.360 |
it is still a machine unlike human consciousness, creativity and experience.
|
| 00:50:06.000 |
CHAGEPT can provide valuable assistant in generating text and organizing ideas, but ultimately
|
| 00:50:11.200 |
humans must make decisions about the content and direction of their writing.
|
| 00:50:15.680 |
And then the other question that I asked it, what can the humanities teach that generative
|
| 00:50:20.160 |
AI cannot already do faster and better?
|
| 00:50:23.560 |
And CHAGEPT responded.
|
| 00:50:25.320 |
It is important to recognize that the humanities involve critical thinking, interpretation,
|
| 00:50:30.200 |
analysis of complex ideas and concepts.
|
| 00:50:32.920 |
These skills require creativity, empathy and an understanding of culture and historical
|
| 00:50:36.840 |
context, which are difficult for AI to replicate.
|
| 00:50:41.480 |
So I would end our conversation today by saying the following.
|
| 00:50:46.400 |
Technology changes all the time.
|
| 00:50:48.520 |
We are for sure living in an era in which every few months, something permethian comes
|
| 00:50:55.200 |
out onto the market, right?
|
| 00:50:57.920 |
So what stays remarkably stable throughout human history is human nature, right?
|
| 00:51:03.680 |
That is the great mystery that we need to study, and this is the great mystery that
|
| 00:51:08.320 |
is the topic of the humanities.
|
| 00:51:10.360 |
So definitions of what it means to be human constantly change and supersede one another.
|
| 00:51:15.800 |
When we as a civilization finally solve the mystery of this internal dialogue that happens
|
| 00:51:21.640 |
within ourselves and we call human nature, well then we won't be talking about generative
|
| 00:51:26.000 |
artificial intelligence in humans, but we would just have angels left on earth.
|
| 00:51:31.040 |
Well, that's very well said, but I have to go back to this very trivializing definition
|
| 00:51:37.040 |
that the GPT gave you why it doesn't have human consciousness, critical thinking and so forth.
|
| 00:51:45.760 |
Yeah, what is consciousness going back to DH Lawrence thought is the welling up of unknown
|
| 00:51:51.640 |
life into consciousness.
|
| 00:51:54.520 |
So what that definition of the mind amputates is the unknown life that wells up into whatever
|
| 00:52:02.800 |
this thing is that we call consciousness.
|
| 00:52:06.400 |
So it's not enough just to say that we are conscious and AI is not conscious.
|
| 00:52:12.240 |
The mystery is what is welling up, what is the unknown life that wells up into this
|
| 00:52:18.720 |
consciousness, what are the sources from it?
|
| 00:52:22.320 |
So that I think is a mystery that we don't want to solve because to solve a mystery is
|
| 00:52:27.600 |
also to neutralize it.
|
| 00:52:30.520 |
We want to open ourselves to the mystery.
|
| 00:52:33.320 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:52:34.320 |
Well, I will let the last word to Hannah Arendt where she writes, "Men, if there were ever
|
| 00:52:40.560 |
to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and seize to ask unanswerable questions
|
| 00:52:47.320 |
would lose not only the ability to produce work of arts, but also the capacity to ask the
|
| 00:52:52.520 |
answerable questions upon which every civilization is found."
|
| 00:52:57.320 |
Very nice.
|
| 00:52:59.120 |
Now we're going to end our show with a rather dissonant song given what we've been talking
|
| 00:53:06.040 |
about, but we wanted to play it because I didn't mention that you actually come from
|
| 00:53:10.120 |
North Macedonia and so it's come a long way from North Macedonia to the Silicon Valley
|
| 00:53:16.440 |
and all these reckoned-diet issues that we've been discussing on the show today.
|
| 00:53:21.040 |
But you brought a song for our exit music that you might just want to tell us what we're
|
| 00:53:28.200 |
going to be listening to and what our listeners know about the band and the name of the
|
| 00:53:33.040 |
song.
|
| 00:53:34.040 |
Thank you Robert.
|
| 00:53:35.040 |
Yes, I, this is a personally very beautiful moment for me.
|
| 00:53:39.320 |
So we are ending our show today by hearing the North Macedonia band called Anastasia,
|
| 00:53:46.280 |
we're going to hear the song Time Never Ends, which was part of the soundtrack of the film
|
| 00:53:52.240 |
before the rain by Milchomanschowski.
|
| 00:53:54.880 |
And I think it's a very appropriate way to end the show because again, as someone who comes
|
| 00:53:59.840 |
from the south of Europe and from part of the civilization that gave us ancient philosophy,
|
| 00:54:09.520 |
this song just brings back what you were talking about Robert.
|
| 00:54:13.560 |
It brings back the mystery.
|
| 00:54:15.160 |
I feel that we lack today.
|
| 00:54:18.520 |
Okay, I'm reminding our listeners that we've been speaking with Anna Yevsky, who's
|
| 00:54:23.040 |
a Mellon fellow here at Stanford at the Humanity Center, and I'm Robert Harrison for
|
| 00:54:27.640 |
entitled opinions.
|
| 00:54:29.280 |
Bye bye.
|
| 00:54:29.640 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:54:39.640 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:54:49.640 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:54:59.640 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:55:09.640 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:55:19.640 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:22.300 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:24.880 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:27.460 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:30.040 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:32.620 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:35.200 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:37.780 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:40.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:45.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:50.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:55:59.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:08.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:13.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:18.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:25.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:34.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:39.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:44.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:56:51.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:02.360 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:04.940 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:07.520 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:10.100 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:12.680 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:15.260 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:57:17.840 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:20.420 |
(audience applauding)
|
| 00:57:23.420 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:26.000 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:31.000 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:36.000 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:41.000 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:46.000 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:51.000 |
(gentle music)
|
| 00:57:53.580 |
You
|