If the human race was really as bright as it thinks it is there would be little hope for the future. But I believe we are only just beginning a new era in which our thinking system is going to change more than it has changed in the last two thousand years.
Edward De Bono
In school, I learned the value of doing math manually. Not only was this satisfying—striving to precisely resolve complexity into simpler forms—it was good for me.
I gained discipline. An appetite for doing hard things. I later put this conditioning to use when building an earth-sheltered house, I chose to do so using only hand tools (shovel and mattock). I dug each additional room from the earth. I was able to listen to a lot of audiobooks during this process!
I retained what I learned. Teaching is valuable for this as well.
Use the Tool for the Job
But the calculator will do all the math for you! Yeah, sure. I won't deny that. Some calculations would just be too laborious to insist on doing manually. That's not just hard work—it's backward thinking.
Or Just Cheat
I grew up in a small town with terrible schools. Plenty of people cheated their way through. Ethics aside, you have to admit, that's a kind of success, too. While they didn't broaden their horizons by learning new subjects, they gained experience in resourcefulness—winning by whatever means necessary.
So what happens when ML and AI and LLM (and other tech acronyms) become our thinking partners?
Calculator for Communications
It used to just be Grammarly and autocorrect. New AI tools can:
write or revise essays
do research (or just hallucinate)
try to replicate a given style
This puts teachers in a difficult position once more where they must say, "Do the work. It's good for you."
Ostensibly, it's why you're in school—to be educated.
But: school is boring. School fails to sell itself as being valuable beyond how it can help you pass a test.
I can't blame someone for not wanting to do things the hard way.
In the future, brain-computer interfaces will make it possible to offload your everyday thinking to AI. Whether we want it to happen or not, humans always feel the need to improve technologically.
If you had a brain-computer interface, you'd still you, plus 1000x cognitive ability. But then what happens when you remove your connection to this ability?
You're jacked in, you have vastly superior thinking power, and then you switch it off.
This is your brain. This is your brain on AI.
Such capability won't just increase your ability to solve technical problems at work. It will change your relationships.
Two things:
We'll become habituated to more idealized versions of other people. You'll fear not being able to live up to the expections created by your augmented self.
We'll become more jaded and cynical, because we attribute a person's value to their use of advanced AI. "You're a great person because you have great processing power."
We risk a future shaped by technological determinism, where those who have the best resources are therefore the most resourceful, propelled by their ability to gratify their basest motives.
A New Thinking System
What if what's best about us is not our intellect or logical ability? Clearly we are outmatched by machines there anyway. What about the inherent value in our uniqueness? Our sponteneity, our gut-level sensing, our higher intuition?
What if what's most valuable is the ability to ask questions--and to remain in a state of asking questions where it's not about finding the answer? Rather than seeking to stop at a conclusion, but remaining free in a state of discovery?
To me, that describes an inspired civilization.
We're faced with a magnification of the dichotomy we already have within us.
One future is dull and deterministic, in which we let ourselves atrophy within the machine. It will be completely rational to do this. Artificially boosted states may seem better than real ones. Rather than using the tool, the tool uses us. The hammer somehow weilds the hand.
And the other future is Po.
What is Po?
Progress is not a matter of changing wrong or inadequate ideas but of changing ideas which have been perfectly right but are now obsolete. This does not mean that the ideas were never really right in the first place, because on any criterion they were right. It simply means that there is no such thing as absolute rightness. Any idea, no matter how right, may need changing. If this is so, then any idea, no matter how right, should be re-examined from time to time.
"PO" stands for "Provocative Operation" and is intended to signify a provocative statement or idea used to stimulate creative thinking and disrupt conventional thought patterns.
Our conventional thought patterns believe that logic is the most important thing. Everything is either/or. This blocks creativity and humor out of the picture.
Things can only get worse when following the convention.
In the YES/NO system you must be right at each step, but in the PO system being right is not important.
The very essence of logical thinking is that you must be right at each step. But in the PO system you may be quite wrong at some step on the way to finding a new and effective idea. This involves the use of an "intermediate impossible," which is a wrong idea used as a stepping-stone.
In the YES/NO system you consider only what is related to the situation, but in the PO system you can bring in random material from the outside, juxtapose it, and see what happens.
- PO is used to protect an idea from the sharp judgement of the YES/NO system so that it can act as a stepping-stone to further ideas.
- PO is used to challenge YES/NO judgements and classifications that have been made in the past.
- PO is used as a bypass to ask for different ways of looking at things without having to reject the current way first.
More than ever, we need a discontinuity device so that we see new opportunities. This is especially the case when there seems to be no alternative: "That's just the way things are."
Four attitudes
1. Explore: Listen, accept other points of view, look for alternatives, look beyond the obvious, do not be satisfied with the adequate
2. Stimulate: Fantasy, humor, the use of intermediate impossibles and unstable situations as steps to new ideas, try things out, go forward in order to see what happens.
3. Liberate: Introduce discontinuity, escape from concept prisons, escape from old established ideas to better ones, cut through unnecessary complexity, escape from the domination of fixed ideas.
4. Anti-rigidity: Anti-dogmatism, anti-arrogance, against the uniqueness of a particular way of looking at things which excludes all others, challenge fixed ideas, a reminder that the validity of logic cannot go beyond the closed set of concepts to which it is applied.
No is the basic tool of the logic system. Yes of the belief system. Po of creative system.
TEMPORARILY try on something else
Not as a way of changing or disowning who you are or what you believe, but as a way of expanding who you are and what you're capable of.
There's a lot more I could say about the value of Po, because it's basically the same as the value of creativity. In exploring this idea, De Bono has formalized something that otherwise seems nebulous or airy-fairy.
My objective here is to introduce the idea in the context of the challenges we will face in the near future around what it means to be truly human.