Identity Crisis

One day along the walk from Central Square to Harvard Divinity School I had a

bit of a meltdown. For the first time in over decade I was writing academic papers. I was incredibly busy and either reading or writing essentially every waking hour, but I was also thriving. Despite a long hiatus, I felt surefooted in an academic setting and at Harvard, my brain finally felt at home. Yet, that very brain, and all our brains at Harvard, seemed at that moment acutely on the verge of obsolescence. After writing papers on challenging subjects, I would query LLMs on the topics just to see what they might write, and they were really good. While most of my peers at Harvard are writing better papers than an LLM, the gap is narrowing. Across all academic institutions, I would guess that the average student is already handily surpassed by LLM outputs. And taking into account speed, there is absolutely no match. I felt I was playing in the big leagues, spending hours to generate an output only 20-30% better than that of a minor league transformer model. It was that realization that my work and that of my peers was, in a way, comparable to doing math calculations by hand in a world of calculators that triggered my angst. Agony might be a better word for it. I finally felt my brain had a use, yet it was pointless. Artificial intelligence calls into question the meaning of life and our purpose.

We once thought of intellect and creativity as the exclusive domain of humans. Already, transformer models are besting us. Soon, AI will be in a league beyond our comprehension. We are attached to the specialness of our abilities, but the reality is that we make machines that are more powerful than we are. Nobody questions whether a backhoe is physically stronger than a human. Now that our information machines are mentally stronger than we are, how do we remain in control? Must we?