The widespread availability and easy user interface of artificial intelligence (AI) has put great power at everyone’s fingertips. We can do magical things.
Before the internet existed we would use books to help us better interpret the world. Communication among humans is hard. Expressing logic and even phenomena is complex. This is why social skills matter. Among other things, they help us to communicate. The most obvious example of a communication barrier is language. I remember having a pocket-sized English-Spanish dictionary that I used to help me memorize or query Spanish words. The book helped me communicate with others and to translate ideas from one language to another.
Math books do something similar but the translation is English-Math. We can get broader and say that all textbooks are translation devices. They define field-specific terms and ideas to help a person translate among topic domains, usually with a base-language that reaches a targeted generalizability. We can get extreme and say that all books are translators, communicating the content of one person’s head to another.
But sometimes the field-to-general language translation doesn’t work because readers don’t have an adequate grasp of either language. It isn’t necessarily that readers are generally illiterate. It may be that the level of generality and degree of focus of the translation isn’t right for the reader. Anyone who has ever tried to teach anything with math has encountered this. Students say that the book doesn’t translate clearly, and the communication fails. The book gets the reader’s numeracy or understood definitions wrong. Therefore, there is diversity among readers about how ‘good’ a textbook is.
Search engines are so useful because you can enter some keywords and find your destination, even if you don’t know the proper nouns or domain-specific terms. People used to memorize URLs and that’s becoming less common. Wikipedia is so great because if you want to learn about an idea, they usually explain it in 5 different ways. They tell the story of who created something and who they interacted with. They describe the motivation, the math, the logic, the developments, and usually include examples. Wikipedia translates domain-specific ideas to multiple general languages of different cognitive aptitudes or interests. It scatters links along the way to help users level-up their domain-specific understanding so that they can contextualize and translate the part that they care about.
Historical translation technology was largely for the audience. More recently, translation technology has empowered the transmitters.
The progress of technological innovations has been to increasingly accommodate end-user characteristics. Twenty years ago, computer word processors introduced ‘spell-check’. Before that, computer word processors replaced electric typewriters that had memory, which themselves replaced typewriters. Each of these innovations made typing precision less important such that more people could be sloppier and yet still write a document that was comparable to one written by a more precise typist or a better speller. The world looked a lot more inviting to bad spellers with big ideas to communicate.
Now, we have chatgpt and other AI. You can have wrong spelling and grammar and still communicate relatively effectively. You can ask a question, get an answer, and probe for more details. If you want to go down a rabbit hole with customized examples, then you can. You can adopt whatever language you want: economics, sociology, math, python, critical theory… it doesn’t matter. It’s all there for you.
AI has become the next step in this greater translation project that we’ve worked on, knowingly or not. Now anyone can read a math book, understand an economics problem, and then build a python video game to realize their creativity. The AI isn’t magical. It meets us where we live. It gives us something akin to translating superpowers. Not everyone will understand everything. But that was never the case. Rather, we’re adopting methods that allow us to achieve great things *as if* we understand more. Compared to people who lived five hundred years ago, or even just five years ago, we’re all magical.
*This is the obligatory disclaimer about incommunicable tacit knowledge, metaphysics, being, and souls.
Economist Writing Every Day 