Progress should be defined not by what we know, but by what we don’t need to know — or learn — anymore.
Progress should be defined not by what we know, but by what we don't need to know — or learn — anymore.
I n his book The Wright Brothers, the late David McCullough noted that when the 20th century dawned, automobiles existed, but they were rarer than millionaires. And millionaires were incredibly rare.
Enter Henry Ford. Understanding that many men working together in specialized fashion could produce exponentially more cars than one or several men working alone, he brought the genius of the assembly line to automobile production. Ford’s hunch proved to be wonderfully true. While a Model T set buyers back $850 in 1908, by 1925 a better Model T could be had for $260.
As is always the case, work divided is the path to extraordinary advances in productivity and lower prices. Absent the division of labor, it’s no exaggeration to say that much of the world would still be residing in caves.
Let’s imagine such a division, but in this case a division of thought among man and machine. Important as production is, everything that we have today is born of intellectual advances thought up by human beings that are then brought to life by man and machine working together. But what if man could also employ the aid of machines in thinking with or for him?
As it is, we’ve moved from the cave to a present of (and there are a plenty of marvels to choose from) instantaneous communication around the world, with supercomputers that fit in our pockets, and medical advances that have turned yesterday’s common killers into today’s afterthoughts. Picture then, what our best engineers, scientists, and doctors could accomplish if they were able to work alongside computers that think nonstop and without fatigue for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
There is only so much that we humans can do. Impressive as human exertion married to machine is, the body has limits, which is why the age of thinking machines may promise so much more.
What could the world’s greatest minds achieve if they were aided by endless machine thinking that is designed to help them and, in some (or most) cases, think better than they do?
Enter ChatGPT. In short order, we’ve seen a remarkable advance as this “app” (if we can describe what’s amazing as commonplace) has revealed a remarkable ability to not just create opinion pieces, school papers, poems, and movie scripts, but to produce such content in a human voice. Translated, ChatGPT can be asked to write an opinion piece, in the voice of “John Tamny” that sounds like John Tamny, on the matter of federal intervention. (Just to be clear, I wrote this piece, not ChatGPT.)
Of course, not everyone shares my optimism. For example, some fear its potential impact on education. If machines can do the work for us, won’t we stagnate? Won’t we cheat? Given the fear of the latter, there are already individuals at work searching for ways to squash the genius of mechanized thought. A recent headline in the Washington Post read “Princeton student builds app to detect essays written by a popular AI bot.” Can the Luddites be serious? (And yes, they are Luddites.)
There have always been ways for students to get around the work, or even dodge going to class. For example, I can think of a service just a block from one well-known university’s campus that has offered class notes for all the heavily attended classes at the school. Writers of term papers for pay are also arguably as old as university education is. There will always be some demand and supply for corner-cutting.
So, while human nature won’t change, the desire among humans to better themselves similarly won’t change. What speeds up the creation of opinion pieces, school papers, poems, and movie scripts will also vastly improve them. Consider movies. When Pixar founder Ed Catmull produced his first computer-animated film in 1972, the four-minute production required 60,000 minutes of toil. Thanks to today’s technology, it can be completed in a small fraction of that time.
Old animation hands at Disney had told Catmull in 1973 that “computers and animation simply didn’t mix.” Fast-forward to 2006, the year Disney acquired Pixar for $7 billion, only for veteran Disney animator Bob McCrea to tell younger animators to use all the brilliant technology Pixar brought to their medium. In McCrea’s words, “Don’t be an idiot. If we had those tools then, we would have used them.” Precisely. Technology doesn’t replace the quality work of engineers, scientists, animators, or writers as much as it enhances it.
In other words, it’s not worth our time to worry about those who use technology to cut back on work. Instead, it’s wise to celebrate what frees humans from work. It’s called progress.
To this, skeptics will reply that progress will stop if technology spares us the learning that primes our minds for great advances. It sounds compelling, but the reasoning is flawed.
The simple truth is that progress and economic growth aren’t only driven by how much knowledge or how-to ability we can store in our minds via education. Progress comes also when there is knowledge that we are able to forget or ignore. The more that we can shed knowledge and skills made superfluous by technological advance, the more productive and more capable of advance we become.
Consider the calculator. Texas Instruments released the first pocket version in 1970. It set buyers back $400. It surely saved us from mathematical calculations by hand, and computers saved mathematical types from quite a bit more advanced calculations, but neither of these advances have restrained the numerically inclined from ever greater leaps; rather, they freed great minds to focus on areas of knowledge more advanced than the work that was now automated.
Or consider many of those born 175 years ago. Their lives would have been defined by backbreaking work on the farm. Six long days a week in pursuit of mere survival. Food production dominated our existence only for “robots” such as tractors to free more and more of the world’s population from drudgery in the fields. Those people had know-how with which we can safely dispense today as we focus on other endeavors.
Again, progress.
Freeing up minds increased the chances that we would create all-new knowledge on the way to the automobile and, yes, flight. At the beginning of the 20th century, man-powered flight was generally believed to a physical impossibility. As a Washington Post editorial in June 1896 proclaimed, “it is a fact that man can’t fly.” History has a way of making a mockery of predictions, but the more realistic truth is that minds matched with capital have a way of rendering the impossible possible.
All of this brings us back to ChatGPT and other technologies that will think for us. Most definitely they will allow us to forget skills we once had, or, better yet, they’ll free us from learning them in the first place. Amen to that! What spares us toil and learning sets us up for more advanced toil and learning. When technology erases work, it creates more specialized opportunity.
We’ll see this in the form of great leaps on the productivity front, but also through rapid growth in businesses requiring fewer and fewer expensive human-capital inputs at their beginning.
As of today, social media and other communications advances have enabled the formation of global businesses (think Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics, for example) in short order and with fewer and fewer employees at their outset. Jenner found herself on the cover of Forbes for having achieved so much so quickly. Rest assured that with the proliferation of thinking technology, there won’t be enough magazine covers to feature all the “unicorn”-style businesses that will quickly emerge, despite their opening on a shoestring budget. Or maybe there will be. If technology can automate or replace a lot of human inputs, maybe the death of magazines will prove to have been greatly exaggerated.
The concept of the division of labor is not new (think of Adam Smith’s discussion of the pin factory), but it’s a reminder of why we should celebrate, rather than fear, the maturing of AI as a pointer to what we will yet achieve.
Adam Smith saw how one man working alone could produce maybe — maybe — one pin per day, but several working together could produce tens of thousands. Imagine now what is essentially the same phenomenon but alongside, for want of a better phrase, automated thought, and the automation of it in concert with ours.
Intelligence multiplied and combined. The future is bright.