The Curiosity is The Limit
It’s fascinating to remind ourselves that just a couple of generations ago humanity was very different. World wars, divisions and institutional influence & propaganda have now been re-defined by the powers of data and tech. A man-made tool that is personalized to the capacities & curiosities of each individual. A smartphone in everyone’s hands with similar features, and the evolution of everything as we know it. To learn anything anytime, to exist in multiple time-space realities.
To know anything anytime
A while ago, to learn something autonomously you had to know your way around a library, with patience and concentration to find what you’re looking for. Until recently, traditional search engines like Google are a window to a world journal, featuring multiple information sourced by people who took the time to digitize and publish humanity contributions and ideas. Today, it’s starting to be a conversation with a robot; With no further discernment and research needed from our behalf. Tomorrow, search engines might render obsolete becoming the next library.
But how are we communicating with these robots? Does treating them respectfully or disrespectfully affect how these robots perceive or serve us? Are the engineers behind companies like Open AI training the AI to notice and mirror back the politeness of a conversation, or does that happen on its own?
Some may argue that the power of AI is undervalued or misused. Professor Hans Rosling; physician, academic, and statistician, mocked humans comparing us to chimpanzees. He complained about how far our misconceptions of the world can go and how little we use these tools to do something about it.
To exist in multiple time-space realities
Some folks complain about our lack of awareness and understanding of the world; meanwhile the rest of the world is collectively participating in feeding information to different data-cloud structures; the brain of Artificial Intelligence is sourced by any website, application, journal or publication. This artificial brain that has been fed by us, technology-users, now features autonomous learning capacities. It can somehow take ownership of all the information collected, be it factual or flawed, and paraphrase it into a synthesized conclusion. Powered by users may well mean power to the users.
Powered by users. Power to the users.
This new world order is dependent on several businesses that collect and store data such as Snowflake, businesses that specialize in Machine Learning (ML) to create Large Language Models such as Chat GPT, and hardware engineering. All part of an interconnected web that is progressively designed to optimize human lifestyle.
We have seen the darkness of the magic when scandals like Snowden’s on our privacy, or Cambridge Analytica’s political campaign manipulation methods. Learning curves both individually and collectively have made us humble towards the power of our own creations.
The fear of this reality where our understanding of the world around us may rely on robots is natural; not only because of their clear advantage to human intelligence, based on their centralized data pool, but also how the existence of these supercomputers can give unprecedented amounts of power and access to these business owners.
Keeping this in mind, we can easily argue that it’s in our best interest to exercise curiosity for companies such as Snowflake, Open AI, FiveTran, and many others that are pioneers in using and collecting centralized data.
These companies are often interdependent, collaborating with each other and granting access to more capacity, analysis and subsequently, more power.
Thanks to Alejandro Penzini for suggestions and for reading drafts.