I recently attended a Copilot training session at work. The instructors were so enthusiastic about the benefits of adopting AI that I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them my two cents and thus pop their happy bubble.
But nothing can stop me from sharing my thoughts with you.
AI is not the tool that will save Humanity. AI is program/machine learning. We are supposed to teach AI how to impersonate us, outdo us, and somehow this will all help it make us better.
Yeah, right! The elites pushing AI on us think we are all morons or something. Incidentally, it’s not as if they aren’t half right, you know. A lot of morons, imbeciles, idiots out there!
Thing is AI is nothing else than us outsourcing our thinking processes to a machine and expect it to Return our Investment a million fold. If this is not the definition of human imbecility, I do not know what is.
So no. AI ain’t the magic wand that will do away with all the ills of this wicked little world of ours.
The only thing that comes close to that is ourselves. But it takes the whole freaking village, folks. Not just a few best and brightest minds. It takes the whole oecumene – ecumene, all 8 billion of us doing the heavy lifting.
I realized this when I stumbled upon an interesting blog about the sack of Rome (410 AD) by Alaric’s Visigoths.
When I read the title, something came to me. Now, I may not speak Ancient Greek fluently but this time I could make out this fine word: παιδεία.
Paideia, my friends, sits at the crux of a classical education. It is the foundation of the Hellenistic world that spawned the Greco-Roman civilization, which evolved into the Christian Euro-Atlantic civilization of today.
Paideia is what made Rome the shining light on those seven hills of Latium and what made Europa the center of the known world (ecumene), and finally Paideia put a Man on the Moon.
It represents the comprehensive system of upbringing, formal education (nowadays called a classical education), that cultivates a brute person into an ideal, well-rounded citizen of the polis. It is both an aristocratic but not elitist concept, as it is about the holistic integration of the man into the city-state.
Paideia is the goal of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and any thinker who ever cared for perfecting the art of raising us from mounds of dirt into the sublime heights of Godly enlightenment.
In order for Humanity to be saved, it has to be taught. We all have to learn from the cradle to the grave. We have to learn grammar, rhetoric, music, mathematics, and philosophy. We also need to cater to our mortal coils. We have to husband our physical resources carefully, lest we lose them to Chronos.
Time is our enemy.
Paideia evolved into the Latin Humanitas. Which brings us full circle to the moral of this story.
Whatever we do, whatever we make of us, we must keep in mind that our supreme goal should be to implement Francis Bacon’s ideal.
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays
There is simply no other choice available to us humans. And we must all stop thinking in individual terms. And start thinking about the species’ future.
And no, this is not a call for Communism, Socialism, or Collective Thinking. This is an exhortation for abandoning the mindless individual thinking that makes us all prone to fall prey to nefarious Marxist theories. We must stop thinking that any of us can singlehandedly make this world better if we all just adopted this one individual idea or notion.
This is not about rehashing the past or trying out again those socio-political experiments that killed hundreds of millions in the long 20th century. You know, Marxism, Communism, National-Socialism, Fascism.
This is about us thinking as a species about our Future. Now, can I ask you to think about the Deep Future that is so remote many of you will think me mad for even pondering it? I think not.
But that doesn’t stop me from reflecting about it.
If I think about it, I recently had an argument with my BFF about the meaning of Time.
He thinks, as many of you most surely do, that we live in the Now and Here.
I for one tend to have a different view. For me there is no Now and Here. They are both unseizable fleeting moments in time. What really matters is the Future. Untapped, unexplored, with all its unrealized potentialities, that we Humans can explore and develop using our Paideia, our Humanitas. This is what makes us humans. The future defines us, molds us into the finished product. The Future gives meaning to each one of us individually. The Deep Future gives Meaning to our Species as a whole.
We must all therefore hit the books and study until we can’t study no more, and then take a nap, wake up, eat, drink, be merry, and educate ourselves some more. We must do this as much as we can. And never, but never, not in 99 years, accept for granted what others tell us. Always search, research, and never yield to another your right to challenge other people’s opinions.
For what is AI if not how other people have imagined knowledge and knowledge about the past, and have programmed an “impartial machine” to sell/tell you their version of events?!
ΟYΤΩΣ AΤΑΛΑIΠΩΡΟΣ ΤΟIΣ ΠΟΛΛΟIΣ H ΖHΤΗΣΙΣ ΤHΣ AΛΗΘΕIΑΣ, ΚΑI EΠI ΤA EΤΟIΜΑ ΜAΛΛΟΝ ΤΡEΠΟΝΤΑΙ. «Così poco faticosa è per i più la ricerca della verità e molti si volgono volentieri verso ciò che è più a portata di mano».
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Book I, Chapter 20, Section 3)
So little trouble do the many take in the search for truth; they turn more readily to what is at hand.
Götterdämmerung 