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The Zeroing of Knowledge: When Everything Is Known, What Remains Worth Learning?

Knowledge used to be expensive. It cost years of apprenticeship, tuition in the tens of thousands, decades of practice, and, more than anything, the brutal currency of time. A physician spent twelve years beyond high school before being trusted to cut into a human body. A lawyer spent seven years and a bar exam before being permitted to argue before a judge. A professor spent a decade accumulating the credentials required to stand before a lecture hall and declare, with institutional authority, that they knew something you did not. The entire architecture of Western professional life was built on a single economic premise: knowledge is scarce, therefore knowledge is valuable, therefore the people who possess knowledge deserve premium compensation for granting access to it. That premise is now dead. It did not die slowly. It was killed in roughly three years, and we are only beginning to understand the corpse.

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OpenAI Chat is the Unreal Uncanny

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is not only just coming for us — it’s already here and ready to stay. AI can create our Art, write our music, craft our blog articles, write our screenplays and even provide intelligent chat responses! OpenAI is a leader in this discovery of the coagulation of information — using both GPT-3 and GPT-4 we can suddenly become the smartest person in the room, but never the smartest person in chat — and OpenAI now have an interesting ChatBot that provides information and realizations that are both unreal and uncanny.

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What Do You Want From Me?

Today, I recall a certain discussion I recently had with old friend and long time mentor, Dr. Howard Stein.  Howard was sharing a story about a former student who, frustrated with her progress at the end of the semester, confronted Howard after class at his lectern and asked in a loud voice that the rest of the class could hear, “What do you want from me?!”

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Is Intelligence Inherited or Earned?

A friend recently said to me, “All intelligent people should be required to have children in order to preserve the human race.”

My friend went on to argue if you are intelligent you see how dangerous and rotten the world has become and you would never wish that sort of increasingly Armageddon-like future on your offspring; the intelligent are able to see the future and realize our current evolutionary course is in for a major correctionIntelligent! by deadly force resulting in the removal of the current trough of all bodies from the face of the earth.

My friend believes intelligent children can solve this conundrum of a world at war and that’s why intelligent parents must give birth to them.

My friend understands you want your children to prosper, not perish, and the hatred and destruction of the world isn’t something you want to gift your intelligent children with in life and so — my friend’s theory goes — intelligent people have been consciously making the “smarter” choice, the more human choice, to not birth children into a world filled with emotional and intellectual suffering and a guaranteed, bloody, death by radicals.

The unspoken, provocative, angle of my friend’s argument is that intelligence is inherited and not earned and that only “selfish, stupid people” are procreating and that’s why we’re in such a terrible world situation.