The Human Dilemma

We, human beings, have been put back in our place and not by anybody else but by the machines. Apparently, they can write, they can read, can write poetry, paint, create plans, they can even act, and all this in a much better way than many of us. What is going on? We thought that the ability to create was a special characteristic, which, apart from God!, belonged only to us, humans.

What is so remarkable about that creativity, that we hold it in such esteem? Any well-educated person in the past knew how to write a good piece of poetry, how to write a story or draw a decent sketch. That was before the novelists started making an indecent amount of money for something that before was a given. They let their imagination run wild and even if some of them were not good at grammar or style, they kept going. It was the stories and the twists of turns that sold at the bookshops; it was the never-ending TV series which were considered a creativity. Give us more excitement, more twists and turns. I guess that was good enough even at the time of Homer. After all, ‘the man of twists and turns’ was one of his biggest hits. And how are now the creators going to convince us that they have that unique gift that nobody else has? The journalists have already given up — often they just admit that their articles were written by AI, or as they say, ‘has a layer of AI’. Considering the number of mistakes in articles nowadays, perhaps the articles are written by Brutus and the mistakes are the layer, added by the journalists!

We come back to the topic of education. It was always about stuffing in our minds with facts, as many as possible and then making the links between them, combining them in a new way, and finally producing something new — a sentence, a novel, a poem, a conversation. Nothing a computer cannot do. The process of that, however, trains the human mind. And only the human mind can benefit from it and acknowledge it. The discipline of learning is a door to perfecting oneself. We take a piece of information, take it apart, examine it, memorise it and that eventually gives us the confidence that we know that perfectly well. That confidence, even just on a worldly level, affects our whole being, the way we hold ourselves, the way we see the world. The computer can possess the knowledge of the world but will not be able to acknowledge it, it will not be affected by it. In this case, relying on the computers to contain the information and we just using it, will not be of any value to us as human beings. This will not give us the confidence which is the sign of an educated person; we will be just the hamsters turning the machine.

So to the young people I can give only one piece of advice: drill your grammar (the best is if you can do the Classical languages), practice your French and get all those Babel fish out of your ears. Leave the computers alone. Someone is making tons of money out of them but at least that is not going to be coming out of your pocket!