Friday, January 24, 2020

The Knowledge Illusion #5

Continuing about The Knowledge Illusion:

Like it or not, the Internet has become a major player in our lives. It is our main source of information, a centerpiece in our community of knowledge. Technology is quickly transforming our lives. Humans are made for technological change. Our bodies and brains are designed to incorporate new tools into our activities as if they were extensions of our bodies.

There are some worrisome consequences. The Internet's store of knowledge is so accessible and vast that we may be fashioning a society where everyone with a smartphone and Wi-Fi connection becomes a self-appointed expert in multiple domains.

But notice what these machines don't do. They do not have intentions and hence do not share intentions with us the way people share intentions. Machines without the basic human ability to share attention and goals will never be able to read our minds and outsmart us because they won't even be able to understand us.

A chapter on science describes how the average person knows so little compared to the experts. Example topics given are (1) genetic engineering, and (2) bacteria, viruses, and antibiotics. What is actually in our heads -- our causal models -- are sparse and often wrong.

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