David Krakauer is President and Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, a private, not-for-profit, independent research and education center. Krakauer focuses on the evolutionary history of information-processing mechanisms in biology and culture. He chatted with The Technoskeptic to discuss complementary vs. competitive cognitive artifacts—that is, how technologies extend or suppress our capabilities. The study of human stupidity is (no kidding) one of David Krakauer’s specialties. One emergent question: will reliance on AI make us dumber and less creative?
This podcast was recorded pre-COVID, but the conversation has only become more relevant in the last year. Consider recent reporting that college students are using Chat GPT 4 to do their homework. Large Language Models (LLM) like Chat GPT can whip up a college essay or even a whole book by synthesizing huge swaths of the internet. But what does that kind of use do for real learning and the creation of crucial long-term memory? Can LLMs make novel discoveries in medicine, physics, or chemistry? (Note: so far, they can’t.)
We’ve come to depend on scientific advances to improve our standard of living. Krakauer airs his concerns on AI’s impact on real scientific discovery as we sprint into the AI age—whether we’re ready for it or not.
David Krakauer