Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, I think that's a very, I'm sort of torn between the optimistic and pessimistic, state, of the future, but I think there's a very good argument behind what you're saying. So I'm not I don't, I definitely don't reject that out of hand. I think the I actually really liked the analogy to sort of model based versus model free that you were suggesting there, because that is actually applies very well towards Google Maps. Because when my dad navigates a city, he has a model of the world, and he's engaging in this model based planning of how to get somewhere. When I use Google Maps, I've externalized the model, and all I do is respond to the cue of when do I turn right or left. And so and so I think that is absolutely a a good way to to think about this, which is we use technology to externalize building models, which can sometimes make things more efficient because then we can just be model free actors. But there are pace places, like in the example you're suggesting, where we really want people to engage in the more painful hard process of building models of things. And in those cases, you know, obviously, it's dangerous to make it so easy to externalize these models. Yeah. I mean, it's it's hard to articulate. I I think part of it is it's a kind of acquiescence. So I think you're sequestering your agency when you externalize too much of your cognition, particularly if it's parts of your cognition that are useful in the sense that it has core knowledge which would generalize and help you acquire new knowledge or, it's just the the the proto ability of, you know, discovering knowledge. It's just your intelligence and you're not exercising that muscle so you become acquiescent and then you become less of of an agent. And from a collective intelligence point of view, I think this, you know, we're just saying, like, language and intelligence is about discovering knowledge. And if we are all sequestering our agency and becoming less intelligent as individuals, as a collective, maybe we will suffer. But it's 1 of those things that it's so easy for us now just to make grand statements about this. And people in 200 years will look back on this and just laugh and say, oh, you know, it's a little bit like when when they introduced bicycles. They were saying, oh, bicycles are there there there was a moral panic apparently because they said, oh, women will start cheating on their husbands and using the bicycles to go to the next town. You know? That is an interesting fact. Yeah. Well, I think I I do I think history is such a good I love thinking about history as a tool when trying to reason about how people in the future will think about us because I think, you know, we are the people in the future to the past, which is obvious, but a useful tool. So for example, in some sense, we already live in this dystopian world when it comes to physical exercise. I mean, roll back the clock 500 years. And most people most people, didn't have to think about physical exercise as much because most work required physical exercise. So we exercise with our work. And so much of jobs, at least in the developed world, are information related jobs where we don't exercise, and so we go to the gym. I mean, the gym is a is a weird if the like, aliens came down and observed gyms, it would be an anthropologically very bizarre behavior because we just go into a room and we run on treadmills. And we do it because, obviously, we've evolved to require exercise, and, modernity has removed exercise as a prerequisite to most of the things that we need in life. But now there's this gaping hole, and so what we do is we just go to the gym and we run-in place, to satiate this physical need. And so you could imagine, and 1 might interpret this as dystopian or utopian, but you could imagine a world where we've offloaded so much cognition. But because humans need to think about things, or as a society, we value it the same way we value physical fitness, that there's now social pressures to go to these intellectual gyms, just to make sure even though, you know, you don't need to do it for work or it's not necessary for the world to to function, but we feel like there's just value in a human who knows how to reason about things. So we just, you know, we go to intellectual gyms for that. And so we might I don't know if that's utopian or dystopian future, but however we feel about it, I would venture to guess people 500 years ago who looked at a treadmill would probably feel similarly. Similarly.…

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