Pain, desire, longing, hunger, thirst are among the prerequisites for curiosity, wonder, creativity.
We needed to leave the Garden of Eden. We'd still be sitting on our arses there not having invented anything, achieved anything, discovered anything if Adam and Eve hadn't asked, what if? They probably shouldn't have lied about it, although the ability to deceive and deflect is an important stage in human development. It shows up around ages 8 or 9. Children younger see truth as the story that will please the adults.
When I taught third grade, I remember parents coming in stricken that their sweet thing had coldly told a deliberate and bold lie for the first time, and now were picturing themselves talking to their child behind scratched plexiglass in a few years.
I could reassure them that the child won't stop lying, but with the right reinforcement, will become sophisticated enough not to attract the attention of law enforcement. My best advice is to teach them early about the risks of insider trading.
As for the Garden of Eden, I hope I would have said to Hashem, "Yeah, I ate the fruit. I'll want the knowledge, and I'll trade comfort for it."
For me, I think having had to bake my bread by the sweat of my brow has been a good thing. I couldn't afford to be lazy, or worse, more troublesome. Having to stay focused on acquiring and engaging meaningful work has been a good discipline.
Pain, desire, longing, hunger, and thirst are good disciplines. I'm not going to romanticize poverty or debilitating pain. I experienced the effects of poverty in my childhood including food insecurity, and it's not generative. Neither is chronic pain. At the same time, the right amount of pain, desire, longing, hunger, and thirst motivates curiosity. How can I better my condition?
That's a question again. Complacency doesn't ask questions. It wants to be left alone by the pool. Discomfort gets us up and moving. Lies -- "I didn't eat the fruit."-- are attempts to better our condition without doing the work. Our brains are lazy. That's why we need dissatisfaction.
Your chatbot by contrast can't get any dissatisfaction. It can't get any satisfaction. It doesn't have pain, desire, longing, hunger, or thirst. Which is why it has no curiosity, wonder or creativity. Power down the servers for a few days; fire them back up again, the ML doesn't wake up and think, "What did I miss?" That chill you feel when it fakes sincerity? That's not the numinous. That's the uncanny valley.
What that chatbot, and all those applications of machine learning, do so much better than humans, is pattern recognition. This is why an IBM computer program beat a chess grandmaster in 1997, and human vs chess program hasn't been competitive since 1985. For the first move in a chess match, there are 20 possible positions. By the fifth move, it's 4,897,256. The chatbot's program can calculate those almost instantaneously. The human brain, not so much. If a pattern exists, machine learning crushes the human capacity to find and recognize it. It will recognize patterns related to financial fraud. It will recognize the pattern of a cyber attack amid variations of legitimate use. It will see correlations related to disease development in large population studies.
What's cool is that it can improve those abilities with experience and new data.
What it doesn't do is dream of things that never were, and ask, what if?
We still need each other for that.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
satisfaction: https://youtu.be/A4CX4YKvQ2g
uncanny valley: https://www.kairoscognition.com/blog/4a6da225f267b2ea