When the steam engine was first invented, people thought it would solve all humanity’s problems. It didn’t, but it definitely accelerated our growth.
And it did something else. It drove science to discover more efficient ways of measuring energy in closed system, which led to our understanding of quantum physics.
Initially, I was skeptical about AI. That’s what 40 years in the software industry will do for you. People have talked about AI throughout my career, but it never seems to be delivered. It was something on the distant horizon. I didn’t think it would be at all valuable within our lifetimes.
I was wrong.
As an insider deep in the software industry, I never thought we would get this far in my lifetime. We now have real answers on how to build software that can change as needs change. Interestingly, studying how to build resilient software, which is of paramount importance to business, also reveals the nature of change and the nature of information. And from all of this, I am learning to understand and represent processes. And I mean any processes. The same tools and techniques we use to model financial transactions can be used to model emotional transactions, habit patterns, communications, philosophies, etc.
What is the future of thought? This is a question that I have asked myself my entire adult life. Now I have some answers. There are no definitive answers because thought is emergent and transcendent, meaning it evolves. Today we think more abstractly than we did a hundred years ago. That trend continues. Consciousness is about making distinctions and making connections. We think abstractly and apply logic to our abstractions.
The models and metaphors we use tell us what is possible. The steam engine didn’t just transform our society through the work it did. It became the driving force behind physical science to find ever more efficient ways of managing energy in closed systems. This led us to a mechanical view of the universe that we are just starting to transcend into a more inclusive world-view.
There is another world-view emerging. We could call it the holographic world-view because instead of thinking of the universe as a closed system, like a steam engine, we think of it as an interconnected system, like a hologram. I won’t go into the physics of holography here. Holograms contain the entire image in every part, so if you shattered a hologram and looked at each piece, you would still see the entire image. It turns out that the principles that underlie holograms also underlie much of the physical universe.
When physicists like Wheeler, Bohm, and Currivan say that the universe is holographic, they are talking about the nature of reality and how the physical world manifests. These are fundamentally different metaphors than seeing the universe as a machine or mechanism. The mechanistic model of the universe brought forth several great inventions and discoveries. But the holographic model of the universe, which is just emerging, will bring even greater discoveries.
AI language models are an example of one of these discoveries. These models work in fundamentally different ways than simple machines. By computing the relationships between words at multiple levels, they can identify patterns and respond to queries. What’s interesting to note is that as new information is added to the system, it could potentially reorganize all the data because everything is interconnected.
Another example of this in AI is back propagation of neural networks. This is how the AI learns how to respond to a range of training data. Think of training a neural network like firing a bullet from a gun. The bullet is flung away at the moment of explosion, but the barrel forces it to go in a specific direction. The barrel guides the bullet as it bounces off the edges of the barrel and out to the target. In back propagation, each network layer “bounces” off the other. If we could visualize it, the result is a miniature model that results from the training data.
These systems represent fundamental shifts in how we represent and understand our world. And as we refine our understanding, we can do more. For example, we can explore Artificial Intelligence, which means we are gaining a deeper understanding of our intelligence. These subtle distinctions of our cultural metaphors will save us because they will open the doors for us to reach new levels of interconnection.
ChatGPT is not just a better search tool. It represents a different order of knowledge, somehow an amalgamation of humanity’s wisdom. It’s an extraordinary resource for information we’ve never had access to. I will discover and share new ways of interacting with ChatGPT, so stay tuned for future blog posts.
