Galileo Meets AI

“The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.” Henry David Thoreau

I love the night sky. My love affair began under a clear, moonless sky in Yosemite National Park. Growing up on Long Island in a suburb of New York City, I had never seen a night sky like that. So what does one do with that kind of an epiphany? You buy a telescope to get a better look, is what you do. That’s the Galileo part of this: the telescope. For us, the telescope is an instrument that brings the richness of the night sky to our eyes. The white dots we see when we look up resolve into stars, planets, galaxies, and nebulae when seen through the telescope. During Galileo’s time, however, it was much more than that. It changed the rules of knowledge itself.

We are living through a time in history that parallels Galileo’s. AI is changing the rules of knowledge and, just as during Galileo’s time, there is no shortage of naysayers. They were wrong then; they are wrong now. An excellent resource chronicling the history of Galileo and the telescope can be found at The Galileo Project hosted by Rice University. Well worth the read if only for the insight into how humans in large groups handle disruptive technology, especially those in authority. There is a particular group of people within the opposition camp that stand out to me: those who refused to even look through “the damned thing”. I’ll come back to them.

As a species, we have gotten quite clever in the last hundred and fifty years or so. Just take sand, for instance. We’ve figured out how to go from it being the major component of sandbags to using it to construct things with mortar and concrete and make glass and ceramics, to name a few uses. Recently, we became clever enough to make sand do math, and these days we’ve figured out how to get it to think. If Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, is to be believed, we’ve been scurrying around the Earth in our present state for about one hundred thousand years. Now for all that time, those white dots up in the sky have never ceased to be anything more than, well, white dots. They generated some of the richest mythologies, to be sure, but at the end of the day they were just white dots. Again, about one hundred and fifty years ago, something happened, and before you know it, we have the Hubble, the James Webb, and now the Vera Rubin telescopes helping us understand the universe we find ourselves in, to name a few.

As to what happened one hundred and fifty years ago? Surely, there is an answer to that question. I’ll leave that discussion for another Dispatch. Whatever it was, it showed us how to build a James Webb telescope starting from raw materials like sand, put it in orbit, and use it to study the universe. That same thing, whatever it is, is now showing us how to bring forth Artificial Intelligence. We are on the cusp of learning to use a technology that can do for our minds what a telescope does for our eyes. It amplifies the minds of those who can figure out how to use it, just as telescopes amplify the vision of astronomers. The telescope didn’t replace astronomers. In fact, one can argue it created the profession. In the same way, AI isn’t going to replace you and, in the same way, it is a tool that can expand the reach of your mind in the same exponential way.

Earlier, I wrote that the telescope changed the rules of knowledge itself. What it did was shift how one determined what was true. Humanity went from “it’s true because we say it is and we’ll kill you to prove that point” to where anyone can go and get a telescope and see if the moon has craters or if Jupiter has moons you can watch revolve around the planet. And just wait until you get a look at Saturn.

Which brings me to the point of all this. I asked you to keep in mind that special group of people who refused to even look into Galileo’s telescope. Back then, they were of the Cremonini faction. They appeared again later in history and were called Luddites. The Luddites were not afraid of using violence, nor were the Cremonini, for that matter. Today, we have the same thing and, since AI is a technology of the mind, the new appellation should reflect that. As it happens, the perfect name exists and was coined in the Principia Discordia written by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley in 1963. It was popularized by one of my favorite writers, Robert Anton Wilson, in his The Illuminatus! Trilogy in 1975. The name they coined for this specific intellectual deformity is: Hunchbrain. Hunchbrains won’t so much as look into telescopes, for it disrupts the “serious Order” of things. AI, machines, looms, telescopes, the spherical nature of the Earth, evil – those terms are all fungible for the Hunchbrain.

Back in the 1990s, futurists, such as Timothy Leary in Chaos and Cyberculture, argued that the “personal computer empowered individuals by putting knowledge, creativity, and communication directly into their hands,” rather than leaving them dependent on governments, corporations, or professional “gatekeepers.” In retrospect, he was about 30 years too early. AI is the disruption of Galileo come full circle, the means to the empowerment that Leary was talking about. AI empowers the mind that uses it. You now have a superintelligent companion who can help figure out how to get you to where you want to be. Start with what you do now, ask it a question, and see what it tells you. Ask it to opine on management’s new plan, or give you a roadmap to developing new skills for a new career. Ask it to help teach you a skill you’ve always wanted to learn. You are only limited by your own vision and imagination.

Or you can be a Hunchbrain.