I was driving home from Palo Alto to San Francisco, a journey I’d done dozens upon dozens of times before. Only this time, I faced a problem: a phone without power; a journey without GPS. I missed my exit and became hopelessly lost in streets less than a mile from my home. How embarrassing: I claim to love this city, and yet in that moment I felt I barely knew it. Suddenly deprived of my tech, I was unable to find my way, because I had never needed to actually learn it.
I’m not arguing against the use of GPS. But I bring it up to demonstrate that efficient technology can be an impediment to learning. Only through effort and repetition, without shortcuts, can we truly retain useful knowledge.
Much has been written about GPT-3, one of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems. It can do things that would have been considered science fiction just a few years ago, such as generate realistic-sounding articles, or translate between languages it has never seen before. It does so by learning from a vast amount of text, and then making predictions based on that data.