There’s an interesting conversation occurring around conversational AI, and the thought that humans, as a species, aren’t properly equipped to handle their existence. Consider these perspectives when next reading about blind trust in Gemini search results, or people using ChatGPT as a therapist.

Rusty Foster:

Humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it. In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between “language” and “thought” because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense. The two are so closely welded that even a genius like Alan Turing couldn’t conceive of convincing human language being anything besides a direct proxy for “intelligence.” … Very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought.

Philip Bump:

Our brains are simply incapable of understanding such large numbers. We can’t understand “one billion.” We also can’t understand that a thing that talks just like a human is just parroting human speech in the way we would understand it if that speech were coming from, say, a parrot. …

Remember that the human mind is clever enough to have invented things that it itself cannot fully comprehend. Man made a rock too big for Man to lift.

Look at it what it takes for Michael Lopp, one of the best communicators and smartest thinkers on tech topics, to explain how he works with AI. I grabbed a representative sentence, but at least skim the whole thing:

The number of “decisions” the robot made to design the page wildly exceeded the number of requirements I specified. … Like everything a robot generates, the burden is on you, the human, to confirm that what it generates is sound.

So: we have these tools, and we can embrace their potential and harness their output, but entire mental disciplines must be created to engage with them at an appropriate level, while the tools are simultaneously evolving more rapidly than perhaps any invention in history.

I personally don’t know where this is taking us as a society, but I’m thinking about it a lot.