What is the meaning of putting these words down? Is it an attempt to find some internal core, a feeling that must be rendered into language to be understood? Why can’t moods clarify themselves and reveal their deeper meaning without this intermediary? Language comes up short so many times.
I suspect that with large language models, we will have a new type of language and communication—and hence, a new type of human experience. What I’m about to say may sound like dystopian sci-fi, but if we extend current AI with mass surveillance and some form of continual learning, it will create a personalized warden, marketer, guru, coach, parent, and perhaps even a god for each one of us. In such a world, maybe the only truly free human expression will be a silence that can only be deciphered by the soul in its midst. It would be a secret form of communicating with yourself, first and foremost, before we discover what a new language of shared human experience beyond words might be.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that LLMs, taken to their computational and logical extremis, will be the end of this era of language. What may emerge naturally from this mix of societal and political upheaval, as AI becomes omnipresent, is a new dimension of communication and connection between humans—one that would make the current era seem like the telegraph era feels to us today. It will not be about the efficiency and robustness of the channel, the medium, or the message. It might just be about how it remains, always, a few major steps away from being figured out computationally.
If Roger Penrose is right that consciousness is not computational, then the very means by which we connect as seemingly separate instances of this larger, unified consciousness must eventually evolve to a dimension that computation cannot ever catch.
And yet, we live in a time when AlphaFold has deciphered protein folding, which seems like precisely the kind of natural phenomenon that lies at the very limit of what is computationally possible to recreate in silicon.
AI will force humanity to urgently redefine almost every aspect of what makes us unique—our very identity as a species. The greatest irony is that our god-like ability to create new technological and scientific breakthroughs is the very thing leading to a deeper existential crisis about our own nature. It turns out that when Nature or God gives you the ability to be almost anything and everything, you risk feeling like nothing specific. It leads to a crisis of both collective and individual identity.
Across the ages, the deepest thinkers of the human condition have returned, again and again, to a similar conclusion: only one thing can be said with confidence about human nature. We seem cursed to always hang in the middle—too aware to be simply animal, but too impotent, unsure, and mortal to be God.
(P.S. I keep returning to Ernest Becker and The Denial of Death so organically that I think it’s high time I re-read it and write about him.)