I am going to a talk about AI. This is a topic I would normally flounder in, except that someone I love keeps pulling me up from confusion. He uses examples that make sense to me, like Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star and Mr. Incredible.
Being confused is not always a comfortable place. I can recall my mother feeling embarrassed by new fangled technology like CDs and EZ Pass. Give her a stack of records and a handful of coins and she knew what to do. I confess that I sometimes had a whiff of superiority when I explained them to her. But it is my turn, in my sixties, to be the one who struggles with a unique password for every dang institution that wants my money and
information.
Probably it is the shortest path to humility to be on both sides of that conversation. The one who Understands and the one who Tries to.
One thing I appreciate about this upcoming talk, which I can say because the speaker has practiced on me, is that it is reassuring. And funny. The very term,
Artificial Intelligence, begs the question of what Genuine Intelligence is. Or what I consider to be ripened intelligence, which goes by the name of Wisdom.
If I could make a graph to represent my self perception in regard to smarts it would be a bell curve. As a child my thirst was for learning, and the world was set up to help me achieve that. Then somewhere in the middle I
had accrued the knowledge I needed to conduct the business of being a middle aged mother of nine children. But recently those skills have faded in importance, since I no longer make sandwiches or drive students to dance class. The areas of ignorance, like what is my contribution to my adult kids now that they pay their own bills, or how can I be a responsible citizen in a country that is harder to identify with, confound me. In short, it seems like I know less than I used to.
But it occurs to me that maybe that is the design after all.
"Holy ignorance does not consist in knowing less than other people but in admitting that we know nothing on our own and that the things we do not know infinitely outnumber the things we do know."
Secrets of Heaven 1557
