Back in 2013, I wrote that the moment we stop having questions is the moment we become stupid robots.
Thirteen years later, machines hand out answers faster than we can read them. Which makes me wonder whether I was describing the robots, or us.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: answers have always been cheap. Politics, religion, and philosophy have given them away for millennia, and each came with an expiry date.
So what actually moves the world forward? And what happens to a civilization that outsources its thinking to #AI and quietly forgets how to doubt?
In the piece, I also proposed a Turing Test for #ArtificialIntelligence years before ChatGPT existed, and I think it holds up even better now. It’s not the one you’d expect.
Voltaire, Nietzsche, Einstein, Mark Twain, and a certain Greek sage all show up to argue the case for #CriticalThinking over comfortable certainty.
Fair warning: it won’t give you answers.
The World is Transformed by Asking Questions: my essay on doubt, progress, and the #Future 👇
Politics, religion, and philosophy have promised us the answers for millennia. However, the value of these answers is always contextual and temporary.
No answer will last forever. [Though some questions might.] For as long as we can think, we would have questions. The moment we stop having questions is when we stop being human and become stupid robots. I say stupid because contemporary computers can provide answers but cannot ask intelligent questions. It is our ability to ask profound questions that defines our humanity. [As a side note, the ability to ask thoughtful questions is a good Turing Test for a ‘thinking’ machine.]
It is far easier to provide answers than to ask questions because it takes more intelligence to ask a good question than to give an OK answer. And so, if intelligence is asking questions that others did not think of, then, genius is perhaps asking questions that others could not even think of. [For example, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity overthrew 2 centuries of Newtonian physics by asking if space-time is curved and whether it is possible to observe and prove such an outlandish idea.].