We choose what we take with us into the future. It’s not always conscious, it’s not always right, but it’s what we do out of practicality – we have generated so much knowledge as a species that it’s impossible for any one person to know everything. What we have put together over the thousands of years of our existence is staggering to consider.

Societies push toward specialization in this regard, enough so that if you’re a polymath people simply don’t believe you can be able to deal with multiple specialties. It’s not even that a polymath is ‘smarter’. It’s largely a matter of how time is spent.

Large language models are polymaths, but since they get the ‘AI’ marketing, they get to sidestep that. You can make up ludicrous things and simply say that ChatGPT said so to some people and they’ll accept it. ChatGPT and large language models have become the new ‘experts’, which I suppose is to be expected when there is a Cult of [Insert Tech Billionaire Here] where suspended disbelief seems to be as important as any other cult.

The difference is the value signaling. People who want to be like tech billionaires will go out of their way to defend even the most profoundly idiotic things, and that’s a bit of a problem.

The Big Insane Happy made the point quite well.

It’s not just tech billionaires. It’s everything, from religion to ideology to brand of cereal.

Jon Stewart recently made the point very well regarding politics. People have a tendency to support their candidates and completely ignore the problems that the candidates have.

We conveniently omit things.

That’s why this quote hit home this morning:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)¹

Omission is erasing from memory. Not all of that is bad, but not all of it is great either. This was hotly debated before artificial intelligences, most publicly that I have seen in the United States where statues that venerated Confederate generals in public places were being taken to task because… well, because slavery isn’t something that shouldn’t be venerated, and while there’s debate about whether the Civil War in the United States was fought over slavery or other things, one of the good things that came of it was getting rid of slavery in the United States.

Books are getting banned in schools. “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill A Mockingbird” have been removed from schools and libraries in some parts for similar things – for reminding people of how things used to be². That becomes omission, and it even deepens divides between generations.

There is a lot of room for debate, but the debate needs to be sincere and not people shouting talking point monologues at each other. The victors always write history, but no victor has become one by writing history their history alone. It’s omitting someone else’s.

That’s a big part of lines and walls. It’s not just what we include, it’s also about what we collectively omit.

And this is why the learning models of these things marketed as artificial intelligence, but more of a collective intelligence marketed as artificial intelligence, are so important.

1. I had to go look up who Milan Kundera was – a very interesting person who started off writing Communist related stuff because he was surrounded by Communism, much as someone who was born into the lines of a theocracy would be influenced to be theocratic, within the lines of democracy he would likely have been democratic. His later works, though, the ones he’s best known for, ‘escaped ideological definition’. ↩︎
2. Personally, I disagree with that because I think it’s important to understand how things used to be so that we can understand why things are the way that they are now, and why they still need to improve in ways that we’re still figuring out. ↩︎