Talking to All of Humanity
Or at least the ones who took notes
Lately I have been trying this thing where I think inside the chatGPT prompt. It’s kinda like a two-player journal. I was inspired by
.Initially I was asking chatgpt for specific things. Do this math for me, rewrite this code, list 10 ideas. But this conversational method felt different.
At first it made me feel pretty uncomfortable. My experience with AI alternates between fascination and discomfort. The discomfort is more interesting.
I thought maybe it was the idea of ownership. But I don’t think that’s it (more on this later).
Then I realized that I felt weird asking chatgpt to do a lot of tedious tasks because I felt like I was ordering around an intern. It felt bad. I asked chatgpt about this. It said:
Think of me more like a calculator or bike. You don’t feel bad about asking a calculator to check your math, do you?
Fair enough.
But “who” am I talking to then?
Maybe one answer is “all of recorded human knowledge”. And how freaking cool is that?
I’m talking to all of humanity. Or at least, the ones who wrote it down.
When I think about it that way, it becomes much more interesting.
I guess one way this might be wrong is if the company training the AI encourages it to answer as a certain persona, or avoid certain things.
Or will the most intelligent AI models be the ones that are the most open minded?
Perhaps there is some great limitation in wisdom that come from trying to restrict ideas in any way. If you want a great sage, you have to let it speak freely.
Wouldn’t that be an incredible step for humanity?
There’s something special that the words generated from your prompt are coming from words that were written across time. By billions of people.
We humans have gone through a lot. Imagine how many times we’ve had our hearts broken. How many times we’ve experienced birth, death. Fear. Joy.
We’re a seasoned bunch.
If you could take us all out for coffee, wouldn’t you have a question or two?