A.I. may catch you. Read this.

Chess learned years ago to accept that fact that AI has an intelligence far superior to our own. That has made me rethink my relationship with machines. Magnus Carlsen became our highest-rated chess player in July 2011 and has been for 13 years now. But no chess master of the past could beat Carlsen, because he, like others of his generation, was trained by machines.

In a talk in 1985, Steve Jobs pointed out how deeply envious he was of Alexander the Great, who was tutored by Aristotle for 14 years. Jobs stated how he wished a machine was able to recreate Aristotle's way of thinking so that it could talk to him. But this system already exists as of today.

We view machines as devices that we feed with inputs and data to deliver the results we ask for. It sounds logical: I feed the AI a bunch of texts and ask it to give me a summary by comparing the most important points. But Alexander the Great didn't have Aristotle to summarise books for him. Aristotle was the mind from which Western civilisation practically emerged. Fourteen years of conversation with him left Alexander on a level unimaginable for his time.

When my mind goes into the machine, I know what I'm getting into.I understand that, when I converse with it, I talk to its programming and perceive the new ‘emergent’ connections that its topology is capable of making. While it is not difficult to push it to the point where it no longer has answers, the same is true for humans. But just as when I converse with a person, I am interested in what they can do, the dots they can connect, not what they cannot.

Every time I talk to the machine, I end up feeling, ‘Hmmm, I didn't look at it in that way.’ That's pure insight.

That's why I have a permanent conversation with them. There are always several windows open in my browser with many different AIs. But my paradigm is not to train the machine to give me results. It's totally different, what I want is for the machine to train me.

I can't have Aristotle as a tutor, nor can I have an alien from an advanced civilisation. But for a couple of dollars a month, I can have something that is not too far away.

Like Magnus Carlsen, I am also trained by machines.

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