I hope you will forgive me, Professor Harrison,
and not take it as too much of a violation
to put some words into your voice.
Changes in artificial intelligence come quickly,
and what I had done with a generic voice a few weeks ago
can now be done with any voice you wish to wield.
This technology has been with us for some years already,
but now requires only 60 seconds of a person's voice
to replicate it to this.
Yeah, it really does sound like me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Casey S.U. Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford canvas.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When I hear that synthetic replication of my voice,
I get a better sense of how the Greeks envisioned
the afterlife, a shadow world where the full-bodied person
is reduced to his or her idol on, or disembodied image.
In the old days, the shades and Hades
required the blood of a black ram to animate their voices.
These days, it only requires co.
Hold tight, everyone.
A synthetic Hades coming our way.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm joined in the studio today by Anna Iyevska,
a brilliant young scholar who thinks and writes about technology
and the humanities.
She listened to our most recent show with Brian Chong
on artificial intelligence and large language models.
And she suggested that we do a follow-up show
on the same topic from other points of view.
And that's what's on tap for today.
But before we get started, let me repeat the hide-a-girt quote,
"I invoked in the intro to that show.
It's well known to the entitled opinions for gait.
The most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age
is that we are still not thinking.
I'm not sure anyone can tell us exactly what it means
to think thoughtfully, maybe not even hide-a-girt.
But for what it's worth, here's what DH Lawrence
declares in his poem, "Thought."
"Thought is a man in his wholeness, holy attending.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness."
The source of that welling up remains mysterious.
You could call it the collective unconscious
if you favor that term, or you could call it the underworld of the dead,
which is how I prefer to think of it.
Either way, within each of us, is a dark continent of the soul
where voices echo down to us from the past.
It requires a special kind of quietude
and a special kind of listening to hear them.
Those voices come to us mostly from books
and in a world drowning ever deeper in noise,
concentrated attention becomes more and more rare.
The poet Wallace Stevens reminds us of what the solitary activity
of thoughtful reading used to be like, at least for some of us.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book and summer night
was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
except that the reader leaned above the page,
wanted to lean, wanted much most to be the scholar
to whom his book is true, to whom the summer night
is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,
the access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm.
The truth in a calm world in which there is no other meaning,
itself is calm.
Its self is summer and night.
Its self is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Those who today still engage in deep reading are leaning late.
For historically, the hour is late indeed,
even if the world is far from calm.
My guest today, Anatyayyevska, is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow
at the Stanford Humanities Center
and lecturer in our Department of French and Italian.
A comparator to works in Italian, Luza phone and Balkan studies.
She holds a PhD in comparative literature
from the University of Chicago.
She's currently working on a book called Deep Tech,
Literature, Southern Thought, and the Question
Concerning Technology.
She has published on Italian, Portuguese, and Luza
African writers, in addition to numerous translations
and public scholarship on poetry, sound,
and the ethos of Silicon Valley.
And welcome to entitled opinions.
Bonjour, no, Robert.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
So since you arrived at Stanford about--
well, almost two years ago, you and I
have had some conversations about thought, solitude,
and modern technology, and more recently
about artificial intelligence, we both agree
that thought requires something like solitude,
since solitude allows for being in dialogue with oneself,
as well as with the voices that reach us from beyond the threshold.
I, for one, believe that most of the essential things
that come to fruition later in life
are nourished in the hours that a young person spends
alone reading, learning, wondering, observing,
dreaming, imagining, and pondering.
We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence
today.
So let me ask you to start with, do you
think that artificial intelligence, if it one day realizes
its full potential, and help to promote this sort of thoughtful
solitude, or will it drown it out like most other technologies
do today?
Thank you, Robert.
Well, this is a fine question, but one
that I think we have to approach carefully.
I suggest we do this in three steps.
First, let's think a bit deeper, perhaps,
about the nature and location of thinking.
Then we can talk about solitude, where does solitude really
take place?
And then finally, we can ask whether AI
can promote what you call thoughtful solitude.
I really like that phrase, by the way.
So to start with a definition of thinking
that perhaps would be widely accepted,
and I think our neuroscientist friends would agree too.
I define thinking as a cognitive ability, first of all,
specific to language use, that takes place within the embodied
mind.
It's very important that we emphasize the embodied mind
and not say the brain, because there's
a whole series of contributions, such as context
experience, family, nature, culture, genetics,
that contribute to how a person thinks.
So it's a cognitive ability.
The good news is that it's innate to all human beings.
And it is not to be confused with knowledge or information.
This means that, for instance, we can have knowledgeable
engineers, coders, scientists, doctors, journalists,
philosophers or business people, but they do not necessarily
think.
And the adverse we can have people who think
but are not necessarily knowledgeable.
So one thing doesn't guarantee the other.
So in a way, thinking, I see it as the fifth element
alongside writing, speaking, listening, and reading.
In this sense, it's a form of technique.
It's something that can be practiced and can be fostered.
And definitely, we cannot teach a person what to think.
But perhaps we can give them some direction
of how to go about the process of thinking.
So the most important thing about thinking
is that-- and we would agree here with Hannah Arden,
our favorite philosopher, that it's
an ongoing, robust internal dialogue
where decision-making, planning, and moral considerations
take place.
So this kind of internal dialogue requires
a split within the self.
So for Arndt-- and again, I'm going to quote her here,
she's speaking with Socrates and Plato--
she calls thinking a soundless dialogue between me
and myself, the two in one.
And then she writes, if you want to think,
you must see to it that the two who carry on the thinking
dialogue being good shape, that the partners be friends.
She constantly speaks about thinking
as meeting the other fellow who is within us.
So thinking is also very private.
It takes place in the embodied mind
and what we could call our mind as our hidden hermitage.
And I'm taking this term from Julian James,
of psychologists that now is coming into fashion
with generative AI.
So thinking takes place in a private mention
when we are free from the gaze of others,
but they're also free from ours.
The things we think about are usually absent.
They are not immediately available to our senses.
So in this sense, it requires a retreat
from the world, the type of thinking
that I'm speaking about.
Now, here are the problems that we face with thinking.
Logistical and psychological problems, right?
The question is, how can we live with ourselves?
Because in the absolute privacy of our minds,
we either encounter our best friend or our worst enemy.
So now the question is twofold
and in logistical and psychological terms.
Where can we find solitude,
logistically speaking in this world today?
And then once we found that solitude,
how can we bear it?
How can we bear to be solitary together with ourselves?
That is the question.
So thinking is psychological, it's difficult,
it's time-confusing, requires a retreat from the world,
discipline and practice,
and there is no visible marketable product, right?
It's not measurable.
So what do we do when we retreat to ourselves?
And how do we manage this dialogue?
Is the question?
Before we get to that question,
maybe we could trouble a little bit,
definition of thinking as something that takes place
within a mind,
an embodied mind to be sure,
but nevertheless, it sounds like one is retreating
into some kind of internal, psychological place.
Do you want to call it?
Certainly not an organ,
but some kind of inner region or domain
where this cognitive ability that you mentioned
gets activated.
But if one were to suggest, instead,
that thinking is not a cognitive ability,
that it doesn't generate from within itself,
a dialogue with itself,
but rather reaches us from outside of what we would normally
call the mind, it could reach us from nature.
I have mentioned on this show,
I think probably more than once,
that most nature does most of them, I thinking for me.
When I'm in the natural world,
I think very different thoughts than if I'm in my room
or in a classroom or something of that sort.
So could listening be the essence of a certain kind of thought
rather than cognitive ability?
Namely, an open, receptive, heedfulness
to what reaches us from depths
that don't belong to the cognitive mind,
but from some other kind of region of being.
- Yes, I wouldn't disagree with this definition
or with this problematization of the definition.
However, it's only partial, as I said,
what I mean by the embodied mind,
why do we think it means everything that we consider thinking
is a conglomeration of context, other people,
nature, our social environment, education,
culture, genetics, experience,
all these things contribute to thought.
And I think this is the main difference
between humans currently and machines
and why we think and they still do not,
is because machines lack that embodied engagement
with the world.
For them, it's almost impossible to engage with nature.
- Is that because the machine does not have a self?
- More importantly, it doesn't have a body.
I think this is the crucial difference.
It cannot experience the world through its own senses.
It's always told what to do.
- Okay, this is very important because we had a guest
on last spring, Marcus Gabriel, well known to you.
It was a fellow at the Humanities Center along with you.
And we did a show on the meaning of thought
where he proposed his thesis that thought is a six cents.
- Yes.
- And I gather that you sympathize with this notion
that thinking is embodied, it's a-
- Absolutely.
- It's a form of sense, if not perception, at least,
sensing.
And if we were speaking an Italian,
this would be beautiful because centiré in Italian,
which is for me the most wondrous word,
I know in any language, centiré means
at once to sense, to hear.
- Absolutely.
- And to feel, so all these things would mean
that thought is a kind of sensing in this broad.
- I understand.
Now, here is the most interesting problem for me
when it comes to thinking.
Thinking is at the same time,
perhaps the most subversive ability
that human beings have.
It's completely radical.
It's where ultimate skepticism and doubt happen,
as we know from the Cartesian lesson.
At the same time, it is the most susceptible sense
we have to manipulation and to ideology.
And why am I saying that?
You asked before that you suggested that we also think
with nature that so many of our thoughts
are suggested to us by the external world, right?
Well, this is very interesting,
and I would like here to introduce a thinker
that we already mentioned today in the show at the UNI,
talked about in our last conversation.
Julian James and his idea of the bicameral mind.
Well, his idea was that back in Homeric times,
at least in the Homeric epics that he studied very closely,
he says that his heroes had no internal mind space
to introspect upon.
They had what he called a so-called bicameral mind.
On the one hand, there was the self,
and then on the other hand, in the mind,
they were the gods.
So there was an executive branch within the brain,
which are the gods in the Odyssey and the Iliad,
and then there were the heroes who were the followers.
So for a very long time, Julian James posits,
human consciousness or human thinking
happened in this constellation where people heard voices
within their own head,
and they were convinced that those are the voices of the gods.
So today, in our time,
these, obviously, we don't hear these voices of the gods anymore.
So Julian James would say that in a sense,
we have become our own gods.
We have realized that the other voice in our head
is actually our own voice,
and we have learned how to dialogue with itself.
But today, what is the danger now of thinking
that thoughts come from an external instance,
or that that's the only way how we receive thoughts?
Well, then we can receive all sorts of messages.
We can be sent through social media, through TV,
through reading, through conversations with friends.
We can have all sorts of input that could feel like it's
another voice that is talking to ourselves.
Now, the question is, and I think this is partly,
or to grade degree, the task of the humanities
is to understand what voices should reach us.
There needs to be a certain kind of filter,
which is not in place anymore.
Yeah, that becomes very problematic,
because you're going to try to do a policing of the borders.
I agree with you.
Thinking is a very porous activity.
Things reach it.
Things determine it.
It also is not clear where exactly where it's taking place.
I mean, I'm not a big fan of Julian James.
I've tried to get into that book.
And you can't just get into everything.
Some books just don't speak to me.
But this idea of the bicameral mind of the Homeric,
our colleague Andrea Nightingale, who's
been a frequent guest on this show,
she's a classicist, and she's working on the Greek notions
about where thinking really happens.
And it doesn't happen in the brain.
It doesn't happen in the mind.
Oftentimes, it's in the chest, or it's in the limbs.
There's four different places, at least,
says Andrea Nightingale, where the Greeks thought
of thinking taking place.
And all of them connected to the body, by the way.
So this is not in any way different from what you're suggesting.
Absolutely.
But this exclusive emphasis on a mind, which
is somehow a kind of center of operations
for the receiving and sending of messages,
maybe it could be expanded a bit.
But I mean, I agree with you.
Ideology, propaganda, all these things
would not work if the mind were not receptive by its nature.
Absolutely.
It's too receptive.
That's even the problem that, to a certain degree,
I feel today we cannot really tell any more
to what extent are we doing the thinking
and to what extent are these intrusive thoughts
that we get through constant bombardment of messages
and information through social media?
So I would go back to what you said about policing
the mind.
I am absolutely against policing the mind.
And as I mentioned at the beginning of our talk today,
it is not about telling people what to think.
It's about training them how to recognize the pertinent
information and then how to deal with it
within their own solitude.
That is the issue.
And let me go to an article, since we've
been talking about all these New York Times articles recently
that came out in the topic of chat GPT,
I read one that actually Henry Kissinger wrote.
And I know one little anecdotal piece of information
about Henry Kissinger.
One book that he always kept on his nightstand
is Machiavelli's The Prince.
So that I find very interesting given our interest
in Italian literature here.
So he wrote an article alongside the CEO of Google
and a dean at MIT.
And they also like your friend Brian last week
and the way that I wrote it in my own essay for today
calls chat GPT, the genie, the genie of Gen tech.
Genie in the bottle.
Right, he says the genie of Gen tech is out of the bottle.
That's what he's saying.
And what does he suggest for us to do?
He writes, we use our brains less and our machines more.
Humans may lose some abilities, such as critical thinking,
writing, and design abilities.
So he proposes a certain kind of practice
of concerned skepticism or dialectical pedagogy
at the university in education.
So he writes very specifically, or they write,
our educational and professional systems
must preserve a vision of humans as moral,
psychological, and strategic creatures,
uniquely capable of rendering holistic judgments.
So this is where we need to take the reins,
so to say, let's say, in the humanistic disciplines,
in order to make sure that this internal dialogue is robust.
Let me tell you why I have doubts about that.
Yes, go ahead.
Because if you take the high degree quote
that the most thought-provoking thing about our age
is that we're still not thinking,
it goes back 150 years, or not 150 years,
goes back half a century.
Things have only gotten worse.
We, as educators, have seen, at least in three decades,
teaching, how much what writing skills, thinking skills,
everything seems to me in a state of collapse,
precisely because we don't have concentrated attention.
It could be the cell phone, it could be social media.
And any number of culprits can be pointed to.
But perhaps something like artificial intelligence,
and it's coming at the right time to save us
from our own kind of dissolution.
And this idea that we have to hold on
to our critical thinking abilities and everything
that Kissinger is worried about is losing,
we have lost them almost fully compared to what it used to be.
So things are not going to get better by clinging on
to the little vestiges of what used to be
a holistic way of forming moral judgments
and critical thinking and synthesis of these sorts.
So perhaps we need an artificial help
to save us from ourselves.
I don't know.
I just throw that idea out.
Right.
That is very interesting.
I mean, I don't trust educators more than I trust
the artificial intelligence.
Because I see sometimes what our edge--
well, no one goes to speak ill.
So we had this conversation about education.
So what do I see particularly problematic
about the educational system, especially in the US
currently?
I mean, I was a graduate student here.
I went through various universities.
What I felt-- and I'm a recent PhD--
was overly emphasized in our education
is definitely writing.
Writing.
Writing centers, writing tutors.
We write papers, dissertations,
liquid fermentation letters, cvs.
My entire career, so to say, is a graduate student
was spent doing that, doing writing.
Now we charge a P.T. with the arrival of this new technology
into our lives.
It just shows to educational institutions
how peripheral actually writing is.
Because if an artificial intelligence can do that,
then what do we do at the university as professors,
as lecturers?
What are we going to teach students anymore
if we've made writing so central to our pedagogy?
So this is where I think a shift to thinking has to happen.
You mean away from writing?
Away from writing, yes.
Well, listen, the billions and trillions of dollars
that the US government spends on development
of writing skills.
Because you're absolutely right.
Education is not only at the university level,
throughout grade school and high school,
writing is king.
And the more money that's being spent,
the more time that goes by, the worse the writing gets.
I hate to say this on KZSU Stanford University,
but the Stanford students, the undergraduates,
and oftentimes graduate.
The writing is appalling, and it's gotten worse.
So actually, when I read an essay written by a chat
GPT machine, all of a sudden, it's a relief.
I can breathe again, because it's organized.
It's clear and distinct, and it follows a certain kind
of thesis.
And how refreshing is that compared to the coiled
and confused writing, which is more
the norm than the exception, even at elites,
universities like Stanford.
Well, to answer that question, I will mention John
Gilery, whose book we discussed recently,
"Professor and Criticism" that just came out last year.
Well, he sees the diminishing of quality in writing
and student writing as a direct product of the lack
of reading that this is wise to--
Exactly.
--right, exactly.
Exactly.
I agree with that.
So what is the problem now with chat GPT?
The first impetus of Stanford University and professors
in general has been to ban it, right?
Do not allow it in the classroom.
I allowed it to my students this quarter,
and I encouraged them to do their final papers
by consulting chat GPT.
And they came out of the experience quite level headed.
They founded a very useful tool, and it gave them more time
to develop their own ideas.
And I have to tell you-- we spoke about this.
Just in February, I attended the first ever industry
conference on generative AI.
This was organized by a company called Jasper.
They have their own type of chat GPT.
And I listened to the whole conference,
and it was quite interesting because the coders,
the very people who are making this technology,
are also level headed about what it will do to us.
And I will give you one quote by Nat Friedman.
He's the former CEO of GitHub and MIT graduate.
He said one thing during the conference.
He said what chat GPT will do is
going to rewrite civilization.
He didn't say it's going to transform civilization.
He didn't use Thomas Friedman words from the New York Times
that it's transformational, that it's a tornado, a promethean
moment.
He said it's going to rewrite civilization.
And then Megan Anderson, from Jasper's marketing,
said very clearly that we need to reinvest,
so to say, in content, not composition.
Let the best content win.
This is a strategy.
This is how people around generate a very eye-curranty market
the product.
It's about letting you to have free time to develop your ideas
and not spend time on writing.
Now, here is the most difficult question.
If-- and the question that I think we definitely
need to address as a society, especially educators.
So if chat GPT and all these technologies,
such as Bard, Sydney, Bloom, that are being developed
by competitors, if they can allow us now
to spend more time developing our ideas,
just editing the text rather than creating the form,
then what do we fill the space that remains empty?
What do we do at the university, let's say,
because this is our particular profession,
where we usually teach form.
We teach form.
We teach how to write a text, what to write in a specific
paragraph.
Well, if chat GPT can do that to us,
what is left than for us as educators?
And how do we fill that space?
That is the question for me.
Can I give you a very simple answer
we'll do with that with that leisure?
And I'm going to sound like Vernor Herzog here.
Read, read, read, read, read, read.
That's Vernor Herzog.
And it's the simple and most obvious, evident answer
to this question, because you're not
going to develop ideas and avoid.
You can't ask students to sit back.
It's like they come into a class, they're a freshman,
or they're sophomores and things.
And we have so-called educators or instructors who say, OK,
here, what do you think about this?
They haven't even learned anything.
And you're asking, what do they think about something
that they haven't even learned?
How about reading, reading, reading, learning?
Become full of multiplicity of voices that come
from different sources.
Absolutely.
Yes, I see what you mean, Robert, for sure.
There is a specific historical reason, though, why,
currently human beings in general are not very interested
in reading.
First, let me say that I do not agree with Heidegger
when he said that we're still not thinking.
I would rather say that we're not thinking anymore.
And there is a specific reason for it.
So I studied the 19th century, and I've
done quite a lot of reading on the debates
that arose there about industrialization.
So one thing that happened in the 19th century
is the overstimulation of our cognitive apparatus
that began with the industrial revelation,
with the proliferation of choices,
a massment of products, devices, we can blame capitalism for it,
we can blame the bourgeoisie, whatever
we'd like to think.
So we have more career options, more partners
to choose for more entertainment.
So there is an emasement of information
you call it noise that started hitting us for all sides.
I can start speaking about Western Europe,
but now we know exactly how this is filled.
So what is the result of this overstimulation?
It leads to difficulties in decision-making.
We don't know what partner to choose.
We don't know what's right from wrong.
We can't tell.
We don't know what product to choose.
So we've created all these technologies,
these neural extensions of ourselves,
to alleviate the process.
They algorithm suggests what's the next thing
we are going to buy.
They tell us what's the next restaurant we should go.
So all of this allows us not to make choices.
It's created a sort of-- how do we call it?
A brain full of paraphernalia.
Our brains are completely cluttered with information,
so that we cannot possibly squeeze reading
into this situation, because on one hand, again,
our brains are completely cluttered.
Let's call them-- our minds are completely cluttered
with information, media, messages, headlines, anxieties.
And on the other hand, they're silenced.
And how do we do this?
We do this to a magic medication.
We go to therapy.
We do everything to silence the overwhelming amount of voices
that we hear in our own heads.
So now, what should--
But you asked, what are we supposed to do with our leisure?
If the artificial intelligence technology gives us
this extra leisure, I tried to answer it by saying, well,
maybe a little more reading wouldn't hurt, no?
Right.
But first, we have to draw attention, I think,
to how cluttered the mind currently is.
We need to draw attention to people's habits
of what we do when we get home at night.
We spend our entire days working, planning, organizing,
with machines, creating all sorts of schemes of how
to go through our day.
And then we come back at home at night,
and instead of retreating into solitude,
which would be something that we need to do in the evening
in order to come back to ourselves to meet that other fellow.
We engage in even more clattering of information.
I mean, I do it.
We swear.
So your proposal sounds very much like mine.
That you retreat into solitude.
So how do we do that?
How do we do it?
Right.
So I think it's important here to talk about solitude.
It hasn't been spoken much about this concept.
We speak a lot about loneliness.
And I remember Robert when I first came to Stanford,
we got a beer at the local pub.
And one of the first things that she told me
was there's a lot of loneliness around here, which set
the stage for me and was very unexpected,
because I imagine I will come to California.
The weather is great.
Everyone is so casual.
So it will be very easy to meet people.
But you're right.
In the most technological place in the world
where there are millions of people, so many smart people
coming around, there's a lot of loneliness.
However, the Norwegian philosopher, Lars Svensson,
wrote a book called The Philosophy of Loneliness.
And in this book, he makes a very clear cut distinction
between loneliness and solitude.
These are two different concepts.
In loneliness, we are scrolling on our phones.
We are going to the gym.
We are going to meditation and to yoga.
We're still filling up the place when we're lonely.
Some people, excuse me, some people who meditate and go to yoga
say that they're doing exactly what you're recommending.
They're going inside themselves and trying to find that
still point, turning world.
I cannot comment on that because I'm not a yoga person,
but I do feel that meditation in yoga are supposed to empty you
out of the words and the words that you have.
They're decluttering, but they're not necessarily providing
supplements, so to say.
So we need a supplement for whatever we're purging out of
ourselves.
So right?
We need norms for what we should think about.
Now, what do you mean by supplements?
Again, we don't need norms.
We need a bit more moral guidance.
And in this argument, I'm specifically thinking about the new
realism philosophical movement that is coming out of Europe
right now.
We talked about Marcus Gabriel, Marizzio Ferraris, is one of
those other thinkers who have discussed the consequences of
postmodernism on our society, on our education, and the way we
think today.
So they're calling for a certain return to moral and ethical
questions.
And I don't think it's just the task of philosophy,
currently.
It's not just philosophers.
They are doing all over the world here at Stanford, the
human centered, AI centered, we have here everywhere.
We're trying to think more about ethics, right?
We're trying to think about how to regulate these new
technologies that are coming to us.
However, is that real thinking or is it just more noise?
It's a start.
However, this is where I see the difference.
Whereas the industry and professional philosophers, so to
say, see the solution in ethics in specific moral values that
are valid for everyone, I see the question as being born
absolutely in the mind, in the individual mind.
That's where we start building better citizens.
That's where we train people to think in a more robust way and
be able to decide for themselves what is right or wrong or
what is information, what is knowledge, what is clutter, right?
Or what is an actual thought-provoking event, right?
There's a lot of confusion.
I think one of the reasons why we're experienced is kind of
clutter is precisely of this infosphere in which we live.
This is a Luciano-Fluerides term.
We have confused throughout the past decades, especially
through the arrival of the worldwide web, we've confused
knowledge with information.
And we further conflate those two with thinking.
But these three concepts are quite distinct from one another.
So this is something that we need to teach, we need to make sure
that people are aware of this difference so that they can
acknowledge for themselves and recognize what is information,
what kind of knowledge are they being given, what can be
questioned, what cannot be questioned, right?
So there is a return to that, but again, for me, the important
part.
>> How does that differ from what traditionally was being
called critical thinking?
>> Which universities have always presumed to teach
person foremost?
>> Yeah.
That is the ideal mission of the university.
Critical thinking, however, on the ground does not really have,
I think, any more to do with questioning things.
It's not that high-to-garian questioning where you just take
apart an argument.
Critical thinking currently has more to do with theory and
with method.
I, for myself, I don't think of thinking in the solitary, thoughtful
sense of thinking as being directly related to critical thinking.
I think again, it's a kind of opening of whatever region of
the self.
It is that receives subterranean messages from, I can call it the world of the dead,
because every time you open a book and you're reading words on a page,
it's a voice that gets reanimated within the psyche, in the mind that's coming from
the past and coming from the realm of the ghosts of the authors who wrote them.
I mean 99% of the books we read are authored by dead people after.
So I'm not trying to be spooky.
I'm just in a very self-evident way, saying that learning how to institute a
dialogue with the dead is as important as a dialogue with oneself, because
one self is that self that you want to be in dialogue with is a very learned
itself.
And as you say, if you fill it with nonsense, it will respond with nonsense.
So you raise a lot of interesting methodological questions.
How do you declutter it?
How do you guide it?
How do you give it a moral inflection, so on and so forth?
But here I'm going to ask you the tough question because you keep using the
pronoun 'we' and I think that you mean educators and professors at universities.
But I'm perhaps a little less sanguine about presuming to be the adjudicator, the
legislature, of what should enter the mind and what should not enter the mind.
If I trusted my colleagues more than I actually do to actually navigate that distinction,
and it would be fine.
But it depends on who is doing the policing again.
Right, I mean here we come back to the logistical question of thinking.
This is what I think is perhaps the most difficult task, but it also the university and
our profession lends itself very well to it without being the police, so to say, behind
the thinking mode.
We need a space.
We simply need a space, a physical space out there first, in which reading and speaking
and listening to one another can be made possible in direct human face-to-face interactions.
We cannot replace that with Twitter where most of people today get their information,
right?
That's where the food for thought today comes from, because simply there is not accountability
when you are interacting with virtual beings.
So the university, again, not so much as a policing instance, but simply as a provider
of the physical, first the physical space can play a significant role there.
And that physical space in a way, it's sacred.
That's where the practice of judgment comes together.
So what we can do is, this is the basic structure of how we teach, right?
We assign a text or we choose an artwork where human experience is sedimented.
Literature in particular lends itself so beautifully to the study of human nature and
our internal dialogue, because we have layers and layers of sedimentation, of experimentation,
of various points of view of how people think and make decisions.
So when we assign a text like that and we gather together in a room or even outdoors,
like Socrates and his peers used to do, and we come together around the text, each one of
us starts perhaps with an opinion.
But by confronting our opinions with one another, we hone our skills, we practice our
judgment so that then even Socrates, our own rights after having spent the day on the
marketplace, goes home and meets the other fellow, right?
After we have had the chance to practice our opinions, to practice expressing judgment,
and I'm not saying here moral judgment or just the evaluation of aesthetic judgment,
but just working with others who have different perspectives, then we can go home and meet
the other fellow and then have that conversation.
But this I think can only happen really in a one-on-one situation.
We need the human body, we need the authority of the body.
And this is why, for instance, Ariane DeGin also writes that human beings, man, are thought
becomes flesh.
That thought needs to confront itself in the flesh.
Sounds very much like a classroom to me.
Absolutely, absolutely.
However, we are quite aware, Robert, both of us, and I'm a very young scholar and on the
job market, how the classroom works today.
We are, in a way, obliged to work with all these new technologies to engage in digital
humanities, to study media, whatever, but it does not feel like it is something that
promotes thinking but replaces it.
All the logistics of dealing with new technologies create even less space for thinking.
Can you speak now more directly about GPT and why you have serious questions about the role
it's going to play in enabling the process of creating more emptiness for the solitary
sort, the productive sort.
So how can GPT or let's call it just generative AI, can they make space for us?
Can they provide that space where we can promote thinking?
Or the other question is whether those technologies actually will start thinking themselves
in that development of the bi-camera-almine.
So it could be both ways.
Well, I can start with just saying that the debate out there is very vibrant on this technology,
and as I quoted Thomas Friedman before he was speaking over a Permethian moment, and there
is pretty much the same types of camps about this technology that we have in the 19th century.
It's, every time some kind of new product comes into the world, there are the same reactions.
This is something that hasn't changed.
And you think it's overblown?
Absolutely.
I don't.
Yes, we disagree on this.
I think it is Prometheus.
Okay, for me, the use of the Permethian analogy is problematic because then it asks the
question of who is Prometheus, right?
Who is the one who is bringing this new technology to us when newspaper people, journalists
write about this, they always tend to create a metaphor out of this new technology.
But this technology is not a metaphor, it's something very concrete.
Well, I can say that when the smartphone came into being, and especially the iPhone, I was telling
people this is going to completely change, I didn't say rewrite civilization, but this
is completely going to transform human civilization.
Everyone thought that was humorous, if not ridiculous.
And of course, yes, yes, every time there's a new technology, everyone says that.
And yet there is, I think history is divided between AI and a BUI, namely before the iPhone
and after the iPhone, where iPhone stands for the device by which Twitter, social media,
the worldwide web, fake news, all these things come to us in our hands.
And so I don't think it was overblown at all.
In 2005, to say that human civilization has undergone is going to undergo a fundamental
concussion at its foundations.
Well, in this aspect, I tend to side with two scholars.
One is Kate Crawford, who wrote Atlas of AI in which he demonstrates very clearly that
the entire hype around generative artificial intelligence has masked a lot of socioeconomic
day-to-day practices out there, which she's using a term from someone else.
It's called "fautomation."
She speaks of "fautomation."
That there are actually businesses today that hire human beings to pretend that they're
AI's.
And this is part of the process, right?
Well, on one side, we are celebrating this new Promethean technology on the other side.
Companies are actually trying to seem more as if they had AI.
So this is not to say it's not just problematic, but it's highly immoral, right?
But that also exposes of how overblown the moment to a certain degree is.
And again, like I said, with Crawford on this, and in particular with no, I'm Chomsky,
who also recently published an article in The New York Times in which pretty much says
human beings just think differently, we deal with language differently.
And what this technology and this is my particular take does is again, it presses us into
a corner to figure out again, what is it that makes us particularly specifically human?
And it cannot be writing.
This is at least another piece of the puzzle that Chad GPT now showed us to us.
It that is not creativity, learning, writing, aren't what makes us completely, specifically
human.
We should de-emphasize writing in our curriculum.
I do.
I mean, I think it's, well, on the one hand, I do on the one hand, I don't.
I think that sloppy writing, which is the norm in institutions of higher education, even,
is a manifestation of an inability to think and that you're not going to get better writing
until you get better thinking and you're not going to get better thinking until you have
more thoughtful reading.
Ideally, it should be a conglomeration of these skills of writing, speaking, listening,
reading and thinking.
All of those should be fostered equally at the university.
However, the tendency of the latest generation has been to teach us mostly how to write
and a certain kind of reading that is very methodological.
It's very directed towards the discipline.
But at the end of the day, the biggest space should be left to thinking to discussing these
texts with our peers.
This is why I encourage students to use these new technologies to help themselves prove
their texts.
They're making them come to the classroom and have more discussion.
But this, of course, puts a lot of questions out there.
How do we grade then students?
How do we evaluate it?
Well, maybe there is the time is ripe for us to move from those kind of grading systems,
which are based just on textual evidence and just promote more thinking in the classroom.
Yeah, I agree.
What we need is an extended sabbatical at all levels for students no more papers for one
year.
You don't write one paper, you just read nothing more to do.
And for faculty members and lecturers, a ban on conferences and symposia and academic
lectures for one year.
Maybe they also can go back and do some reading.
So absolutely.
Robert, we're saying this in very banal terms.
It would almost sound to someone who listens to us that we're just complaining about
our profession.
But again, when I attended this latest conference or the first conference of Generative AI
in San Francisco, one thing that became quite clear to me that what this technology will
do is it will change education.
This is perhaps the branch of our culture, of our D institution today that is mostly going
to be impacted by these technologies and journalists, tech people, businessmen, they all agree.
However, in these conversations that I have attended, usually there are no representatives
from our neck of the woods, almost as if it didn't concern us.
So if the universities, if we do not embrace these technologies, like for instance, when
Wikipedia first came out, right?
My professors at least at the time when I was an undergrad prohibited me from the
prohibited us from using Wikipedia, the result was pretty much catastrophic because students
still would cheat and they would not double check the information, right?
So now we have charge of GPT, we cannot prohibit students from using it.
We have to teach them how and what kind of questions to ask and what to expect from it, right?
What you mentioned earlier is even though there weren't educators present at that conference,
the threat of GPT for as far as I understand it and generative AI is to take away jobs
from the white collar.
Absolutely.
Which is, you know, finally there would be a little bit of justice in that I mean,
you know me, I'm not far from being a Marxist.
However, it seems like it's the blue collar workers who have been getting screwed for
the last few decades, you know, since Reagan is at least.
And the white collar class now is going to feel the repercussions of this technology, I think
in the way the blue collar workers felt the outsourcing of jobs to other countries and
so forth.
Yes, that became quite clear.
The white collar workers, coders also, coders and producers.
Journalist, professors, writers, everyone who has to do something, yes, with a written
word are pretty much replaceable now by this new technology.
So this is why, you know, I suggested in the first place that we do this show so that we
can think about the implications of these new technologies specifically for everyone who
depends on writing.
So if we can end this conversation by actually hearing the opinion or opinion, hearing the
prediction of CHAGEPT itself on this topic, I actually asked it some of the questions
that we discussed today.
So first of all, I asked it what happens when the structuring of cognitive language
abilities is relinquished to an external artificial agent such as CHAGEPT.
And CHAGEPT answered.
It is important to know that while CHAGEPT can generate text and structure language,
it is still a machine unlike human consciousness, creativity and experience.
CHAGEPT can provide valuable assistant in generating text and organizing ideas, but ultimately
humans must make decisions about the content and direction of their writing.
And then the other question that I asked it, what can the humanities teach that generative
AI cannot already do faster and better?
And CHAGEPT responded.
It is important to recognize that the humanities involve critical thinking, interpretation,
analysis of complex ideas and concepts.
These skills require creativity, empathy and an understanding of culture and historical
context, which are difficult for AI to replicate.
So I would end our conversation today by saying the following.
Technology changes all the time.
We are for sure living in an era in which every few months, something permethian comes
out onto the market, right?
So what stays remarkably stable throughout human history is human nature, right?
That is the great mystery that we need to study, and this is the great mystery that
is the topic of the humanities.
So definitions of what it means to be human constantly change and supersede one another.
When we as a civilization finally solve the mystery of this internal dialogue that happens
within ourselves and we call human nature, well then we won't be talking about generative
artificial intelligence in humans, but we would just have angels left on earth.
Well, that's very well said, but I have to go back to this very trivializing definition
that the GPT gave you why it doesn't have human consciousness, critical thinking and so forth.
Yeah, what is consciousness going back to DH Lawrence thought is the welling up of unknown
life into consciousness.
So what that definition of the mind amputates is the unknown life that wells up into whatever
this thing is that we call consciousness.
So it's not enough just to say that we are conscious and AI is not conscious.
The mystery is what is welling up, what is the unknown life that wells up into this
consciousness, what are the sources from it?
So that I think is a mystery that we don't want to solve because to solve a mystery is
also to neutralize it.
We want to open ourselves to the mystery.
Absolutely.
Well, I will let the last word to Hannah Arendt where she writes, "Men, if there were ever
to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and seize to ask unanswerable questions
would lose not only the ability to produce work of arts, but also the capacity to ask the
answerable questions upon which every civilization is found."
Very nice.
Now we're going to end our show with a rather dissonant song given what we've been talking
about, but we wanted to play it because I didn't mention that you actually come from
North Macedonia and so it's come a long way from North Macedonia to the Silicon Valley
and all these reckoned-diet issues that we've been discussing on the show today.
But you brought a song for our exit music that you might just want to tell us what we're
going to be listening to and what our listeners know about the band and the name of the
song.
Thank you Robert.
Yes, I, this is a personally very beautiful moment for me.
So we are ending our show today by hearing the North Macedonia band called Anastasia,
we're going to hear the song Time Never Ends, which was part of the soundtrack of the film
before the rain by Milchomanschowski.
And I think it's a very appropriate way to end the show because again, as someone who comes
from the south of Europe and from part of the civilization that gave us ancient philosophy,
this song just brings back what you were talking about Robert.
It brings back the mystery.
I feel that we lack today.
Okay, I'm reminding our listeners that we've been speaking with Anna Yevsky, who's
a Mellon fellow here at Stanford at the Humanity Center, and I'm Robert Harrison for
entitled opinions.
Bye bye.
[MUSIC]
(upbeat music)
(gentle music)
(audience applauding)
(gentle music)
You