Our biggest problem: We don’t know anything

The movie I, Tonya starring the successful actor Margot Robbie includes a scene in which she is questioned by an African American FBI agent. Tonya is a world-champion figure skater. She is being investigated for an attempt to arrange a contract to have the legs of her chief skating rival broken so Tonya can win the world figure skating championships unopposed.

The FBI agent asks her what she can tell him about the investigation and Tonya replies, “We don’t know anything.” The agent wryly observes, “That must make life hard for you.”

No doubt that the state of “not knowing anything” would make life very hard in a world of rapidly changing 24-hour news cycles and complex technology and yet it is a state which, unfortunately, characterizes many.

We are now in the era of the greatest literacy per head of population in history and yet many are illiterate.  Books in every form are available everywhere but people won’t read them.

It has been common for one generation to be critical of the intellect of the succeeding one, a characteristic of human societies that goes back as far as ancient Greece. The time appears to have arrived now when this criticism is a valid worry. This extends beyond the fact that the young attendant at the cash register cannot deduct 74 from 100 without a calculator.

One thousand years ago less than 10% of the population could read a book and books were not widely available. By the year 1500, the printing press had been invented and the number of people who could read was as high as 50 %. In the Western world, the literacy rate now exceeds 90% but in the public middle schools or early high schools, literacy rates have again fallen as low as 50%, and numeracy rates are even lower. How is this possible? What will it lead to?

The partial literacy of the middle public schools is not as profound as that of a time when there were no books, but it is severe. Children can write their name and read a sign but constructing a paragraph or analyzing grammar is beyond them.

Communication is by mobile phone giving birth to a weird text language. The language of texting has a very basic form of grammar where many words are completely abbreviated. Even OK becomes K. The texts also contain pictures and emojis, but it is not a true language for several reasons. It is a degenerate dialect and a lot of it uses acronyms, the meaning of which are obscure or changing so that over time even the young people who use them are unable to decipher them. Some foolish scholars saw a new form of grammar emerging or even a new language but that meant enforcing rules on a form of communication that exists to avoid rules.

Children are now able to graduate from school without having to read a book.

The inability to read and write discloses a lack of interest in books. Schools have largely downplayed or grossly simplified geography, history, and ethics in the curriculum. English grammar is no longer taught, and schools are constantly under pressure to remove the study of Shakespeare. Instead, books are either children’s novels, even in the senior grades, or graphic novels (basically comic books). Often children are told that it’s fine if they have not read a book so long as they have seen the movie it inspired, in ignorance of the fact that cinema and literature are completely different disciplines.  

The result of this problem was most evident to me when I was teaching medical students who were doing practicums in my medical rooms. However reasonable their knowledge of medicine was, their knowledge of the world beyond this was very poor.  I felt old-fashioned suggesting to them that doctors are expected to know something about life beyond their discipline. The idea that they might have an interest in art, literature, poetry, or music seemed completely beyond them.

 If I encountered a student who was Sikh, she knew nothing about the fascinating origin or history of her faith. Most had heard of Josef Stalin but knew nothing about him. They had heard of Puerto Rico. Was it a country, a state, and where was it? Nothing.

They all liked the idea of travel but where would they go and what would they look at if they knew nothing about the world or its history?

Let’s face it, wisdom and knowledge have become almost an embarrassment. The world is for the young the enthusiastic the “go-getters”. What does it matter if they don’t know what they are doing so long as they are doing it? Activity is regarded as progress; movement is regarded as change. TikTok reigns supreme.

Scott H Young in Untralearning (March 2023), has pointed out that the decline in book reading is becoming most alarming in college graduates. This means that the increasingly poor rates of reading in school children are being carried over as they go into college and University education. My students don’t know things outside their discipline because they don’t read.

Now we have ChatGPT or its Google equivalent Bard. A lot of famous people have been infected by a Doomsday bug, declaring that AI (artificial intelligence) in these programs is so good it will be the end of us. To quote Charles Dickens “Bah! Humbug!” Foolish educators and a lot of students both at college and in school have latched on to this notion, believing that these AI programs can write their assignments, plead law cases and rapidly solve difficult Math problems. They may be deluding themselves.

ChatGPT and other AI programs are essentially language programs. They perform very poorly in dealing with complex Mathematical problems and it seems at this early stage that their developers will have trouble improving that performance because of a problem known as The Turing Gödel Paradox, a complex problem that cannot be analyzed in detail here but is to do with the fact that human beings can recognize Mathematical proofs that computers cannot, an understanding Gödel reached on studying the Principia Mathematica by the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Despite claims that these AI programs are supposed to be better in questions involving Language, Philosophy, English, History, and so forth, ChatGPTs’ major failings reveal themselves when the learned reader comes to grips with them.

Judges, for example, can see immediately when lawyers are relying on Chat GPT to do their pleadings, but it is best if I give an illustration here outside legal issues. This will reveal these programs to be like the Wizard of Oz hiding behind a curtain using a microphone.

Look at the simple sentence. “I couldn’t put the bottle in the suitcase because it was too large.” Artificial intelligence, unlike human beings, cannot understand this sentence.

If you query CHATGP about Indira Ghandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, a wealth of information is provided, and similarly, if you ask about the Sikh religion a lot of material emerges but if you ask what happened to the two Sikh bodyguards who assassinated Mrs. Ghandhi (they were executed) it can’t tell you. There is not just this very important turning point in Indian history that stumps ChatGPT there are many others if the well-read person chooses to play around with it.

The next generation needs to know that if artificial intelligence means something mimicking what humans have, then true Artificial Intelligence is some way off.

ChatGPT and other AI programs are of no assistance to the illiterate school student who on one day can scarcely compose a sentence but when given an assignment the following day produces a perfectly grammatical, spelling-free document. He or she is more likely to find themselves in trouble for plagiarism.

Another strange aspect of AI programs is emerging. It is now evident that AI programs take a social activist position which leads to error and false information. It has long been argued by the proponents of gender reassignment (hormones and surgery) that children who are not allowed to access puberty blockers and surgical treatment, to change their gender, have a much higher rate of suicide. If you interrogate AI programs, ChatGPT and Bard (google) they support this position and state that the rate of suicide in youth denied transition treatment is 20% higher. This is completely false and obviously, no research supports this because, firstly, it is far too early to determine this either way, and, as yet, no research is available which can tease out all the predisposing issues of mental illness and social disadvantage.

The fact that AI programs like ChatGPT take a misleading position on social issues in the absence of clear scientific evidence to the contrary and have the other problems I outlined above, demonstrate such inadequacy that they cannot be trusted.  In other words, if you don’t know anything, computer programs are not about to save you.

If you don’t know anything, don’t turn to computers. Start reading stuff.