For the most part, the going concerns were not about matters of policy as much as they were about matters of philosophy. The neuroscientist and writer Erik Hoel, who sported an impressive beard, told me that he hated that A.I. compromised human freedom. “Iwant a world where my kids are able to matter in the way that our generation was able to matter and make choices,” he said. (View Highlight)
Of course, it’s nice to have The New Yorker’s official blessing for my beard, but overall, the changes to our world are increasingly depressing. During my life culture has taken hit after hit, first in the form of rampant politicization and culture war mishmash and grifting, and now culture is being enervated by AI. And one thing I’ve been personally struggling with is how much to tell my kids about the technological developments that will define their entire lives—especially as my kids are just now starting to actually get good at things, and develop talents… any of which AI off the shelf can be superhuman at. (View Highlight)
But right now they know basically nothing about AI, which is excusable because they are 5 years old, 3 years old, and 3 months old, respectively. And I have absolutely zero patience for the idea that kids should get heavy exposure to AI as early as possible, because I firmly believe that education should recapitulate civilization. (View Highlight)
This is an idea stolen from the famous phrase in biology, that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” and embryos go through all their prior ancestral forms. (View Highlight)
It’s mostly wrong, of course. But it’s still a beautiful and elegant idea, and it’s right enough to be interesting, like how baleen whales grow teeth in the womb before absorbing them and replacing them with bristles, or how human embryos sprout a small tail that shyly retreats. (View Highlight)
So too do I think education should recapitulate civilization—by which I mean the progress of civilization. First, the baby lives in a stone-age world where the most interesting things are objects and how they form into tools; next comes art, before even language—attractive patterns, the making of pictures and colors as if on cave walls, as these are tools extending into the abstract realm; then comes language and thought, and the sparks of reasoning and planning; then, literacy, the big bang, as oceans of knowledge begin to pour into the waiting receptacle; following that, mathematics, as reasoning reaches its apotheosis and the mind accesses the platonic realm, and so on and so forth. In terms of what this means practically, the progression focuses on first the physical world and the people in it, then oral culture as stories are mainly told (either read aloud by parents or listening to Yoto players), then after that literacy itself, and then films are introduced like Disney classics or Studio Ghibli, then more complex, longer books—we are here—and then eventually television, video games, the internet, social media, and finally, at the end of intellectual development, artificial intelligence. (View Highlight)
A child following this path is then a synecdoche for history, and I think it is neurologically healthy and natural for a human brain to develop via the same path of human civilization itself. (View Highlight)
